ABSTRACT
Thoughtful novels have to be very good to achieve success. Therefore, Mr George Gissing, who now declares himselfto have been responsible for Demos, a thoughtful novel which attracted a good deal ofattention a year or so ago, is a noticeable recruit in the select ranks of the particular industry now under consideration. Every page of Thyrza is thoughtful; but there is also a good deal in it that is attractive, and very much that is powerful. The hero is named Walter Egremont, and he
is a prig comnte il y en a peu. His father had been a workman; but he made a fortune, and brought up Walter as a gentleman. The consequence was that the young man spent his time in weighing his own soul (and finding it wanting) and his money in pedantic schemes for the improvement of other people. This brought him into relations with Thyrza, a weak-bodied and weak-minded working-girl. Her soul was a very sponge for softness and expansiveness, and consequently it turned out thoroughly unpractical, and burst its earthly shackles at an early period, much to the advantage of the society in which she moved. This society was that of the respectable slums to the south of Westminster Bridge Road (a road which appears to the superficial observer to run north and south, but in reality runs east and west), and Mr Gissing either knows by experience, or intuitively divines, quite as much about it as George Eliot did about English Jews. His description may be faithful or it may not, but it is wonderfully vivid and picturesque. Thyrza, being engaged to Egremont's principal workman protege, falls desperately in love with Egremont, and he with her, though he does not avow his passion. Great complications and profound though high-toned misery naturally ensue, and form the groundwork ofthe story. The plot might have been compassed by anyone of a thousand living authors; but the crowd of people incidentally introduced are admirable. Egremont, his workman friend, whom he unwittingly betrays, and his associates generally, have a great many discussions about how they can best do each other good; but Mr Gissing, like a shrewd observer, brings their machinations to nought, and the more they meddle with other people's affairs the greater grief they come to. This is as it should be and as it would be, and Mr Gissing deserves credit for it. Eventually a marriage is arranged between Egremont and apleasant young lady, whose principal weakness is being, and having for some years been, in love with him. It is more than he deserves, and it is particularly irritating that he by no means adequately appreciates his good fortune. Naturally enough, there are a few affectations of language to be found in the book. 'Quieten' is not English, any more than 'The sweet lips that so passioned for his.' These errors are worth censuring because they are deliberate. Probably no one alive is entitled to make new verbs intentionally; certainly Mr Gissing is not. There is a great deal of good stuff in the book, but it is almost exclusively among the thoughtless poor of Lambeth. An old atheist, and his courtship of (and by) a rattle-pated Roman Catholic workgirl, are particularly pleasing; and there is a clever sketch of a
