ABSTRACT
Eve's Ransom, Mr Gissing's last novel, is not only fully up to the intellectuallevel ofMr Gissing's former work, but it is for the first time, to our thinking, possessed of just that subtle power of arresting the attention and arousing the sympathies of the reader which such work as In the Year ofJubilee or The Emancipated lacked. The central figure, Maurice Hilliard, is a study of great and unusual interest. When the story opens he is a mechanical draughtsman on a salary of£100 a year, of which he gives £50 away to his brother's widow. His work is uncongenial to him; he has no prospect ofever being able to gratify the rather fastidious tastes with which he was born; life stretches before him like an arid waste; and in order to blind his eyes to the prospect and to dull his nerves he is beginning to drink. Just at this moment a former creditor ofhis father's, being seized with qualms ofconscience, sends him a cheque for £400. In a moment everything is changed and he becomes a new man. 'And what are you going to do?' asks his friend. 'I'm going to live,' replies Hilliard; 'going to be a machine no longer. Can I call myself a man? There's precious little difference between a fellow like me and the damned grinding mechanism that I spend all my days in drawing. I'll put an end to that. Here's £400. It shall mean four hundred pounds worth oflife. While this money lasts I'll feel that I'm a human being.' And so he does. The craving for drink, born of monotony and hopelessness, disappears, swallowed up in the satisfaction of long-repressed and rational desires. In the use to
which Maurice Hilliard puts his freedom is to be found the story ofthe book, while the effect of freedom upon a nature so constituted forms its central and underlying idea. The first impression left by the book is one of acute depression. Is it really true, one asks oneself: that the average clerk leads the consciously repressed starved life of Maurice Hilliard before his emancipation? In other words, is the case selected by Mr Gissing for presentation typical? At first, so complete is the illusion produced, one feels inclined' to believe that it is, following therein the natural inclination to argue from the particular to the general. And while this impression lasts depression is inevitable, for were it really so it would prove beyond doubt that this is the worst of all possible worlds. But in the end the conviction that Maurice Hilliard is and always will be an exception wins the day, though that he should exist at all is bad enough. The real arnor intellectualis is as rare as the passionate desire for freedom. Most men hug their chains, and ifyou gave the average man £400 and his liberty the chances are that he would gamble it away on the nearest racecourse. As a rule man fits his environment, and it is only rarely that a square individual finds himself in a round hole, though when it has so happened the individual has generally had his angles remorselessly pared to make him fit like the rest. But we are coming to see that the helping ofthe square individuals out ofround holes into square ones is one ofour principal duties as human beings, even though it should involve the gradual reconstruction of human society.
