ABSTRACT
In Sleeping Fires Mr George Gissing has added to the 'Autonym Library' a story which, without his name on the titlepage, would scarcely have been fathered by any of his readers upon the author of Eve's Ransom. It is a brave venture in a new style, and seems to show that Mr Gissing might, if he chose, deal on a higher plane with loftier themes and more attractive characters than his earlier stories have accustomed us to look for from his pen. This impression is due, perhaps, more to the conception and first plotting of Sleeping Fires than to the whole execution of the design, which is of a somewhat variable strength. The drawing of the women is not quite equal to that of the men, though the action turns mainly upon the influence which they exert over a man of forty and a youth of eighteen. It is in the lastmentioned couple, in their relations to each other, in the charming features of their brief intercourse, under a Grecian sky and with a lightly touched background of Greek reminiscence, that Mr Gissing has secured his best effects, andjustifies the impression already recorded. Ifwe add that the author struggles with a problem in morals, and solves it by the methods ofthe present generation rather than by those of the generations that lived before us, it is not with any desire to warn off the reader who has had enough and to spare of latter-day morality problems. Mr Gissing is sane and delicate; he may have sacrificed some ofthe intensities that a keener spirit would have read into such a theme as he has chosen, but he has worked out his story on straight and sensible lines. He does not, however, commend his scholar to our good opinion by making himjump on the railway platform at Corinth with
