ABSTRACT
The novel of sordid motives and prosaic characters has been made so revolting by Zola and his followers that the reader who gives a brief preliminary glance to Mr Gissing's The Whirlpool feels tempted to put the book down. But if he has remembered any of this author's other books he perseveres through the many pages of the present volume and relinquishes it unwillingly at the end. For Mr Gissing is one of those rare writers who, without professing to find romance or beauty in every-day life, nevertheless wrest from such unpromising material a certain human and spiritual significance which is in its way beautiful and romantic. The Whirlpool is persistently and superabundantly sordid. There are touches of such brilliancy as might be expected in a book dealing more or less with fashionable society in a great city, but a drab tone ultimately kills whatever color the novelist may have sought to secure. The fact is he does not seem to have been in search of any color at all. He is vivid, but it is with the vividness of a strong draughtsman in black and white. His aim is for subtleties of feeling and emotion, not for the external nuances ofa social spectacle. It shows his power. A lesser man, desiring to touch the imagination with a sense ofthe evil at work in the lives ofmen and women in the world, would have thought it necessary to paint their world as well as their own characters. Mr Gissing leaves us to draw our own conclusions as to the environing causes of the deterioration which we see going on among the actors in his drama.
