ABSTRACT
Veranilda, Will Warburton, and now The House of Cobwebs-each in their tum these posthumous volumes-will have been eagerly welcomed in the hope ofadding to Gissing's chance of a permanent place in literature. The sad, stunted years of his first literary activity gave scant opportunity for the full development of his genius, and if his earlier works were necessarily one-sided, full of the sense of monotonous misery illumined by ideals which were always set forth as unrealised ideals, at the end he seemed to be passing into a new phase of his art which had not time to be fully matured. The critics pronounced that Veranilda and Will Warburton, his latest books, fell short of complete success, that they were, as Mr Seccombe hints in his introduction, 'magnificent failures.' In the present collection of short stories, tardily issued, Gissing is returning to the dismal scenes of his own life and thought; but a little less dismally, perhaps, in his manner, sounding the note of tragi-comedy rather than that of unalterable gloom.
