ABSTRACT
Mr George Gissing is a novelist who may be counted upon for much that is true to human nature, much that is original, not a little that is beautiful, and a general effect of grim, despairing effort after one does not exactly know what. All these things are to be found in his latest work, A Life's Morning. But let no one go to the book in search of the fresh exhilaration of spirits which should belong to the morning of life as well as to the morning of the day. There are two heroines in the story, and each in different ways shows herselfmade ofheroic stuff: And there is one hero-not, in our opinion, heroic at all. Wilfrid Athel is the only son of an English country gentleman, who has made a romantic marriage of the nature of a mesalliance in youth; but, having lost his wife, has committed no further indiscretion, and become with advancing years all that a conventional English country gentleman should be. His widowed sister, Mrs Rossall, lives with him, and Wilfrid shows himselfthe son ofhis father by falling in love with Emily Hood, the governess of Mrs Rossall's twin daughters. The great fault of the book is that Emily Hood is not an attractive person. The author intends her to be such; he attributes to her beauty, refinement, soul, dignity, virtue, and charm. But he fails to make her live; she remains a catalogue of imputed qualities, and cannot, therefore, justify to the reader the passion ofthe two men who lose their hearts to her. The other woman, Beatrice Redwing, is, on the contrary, very living, and in her case strong attraction is easier to understand. But here again the author has gone wrong. Beatrice is a creature of fine, impulsive temperament, capable of caprice and folly, but kept straight by finer instincts of unselfishness and principles of religion. Mr Gissing treats all the parts ofher character with a sort ofcynical impartiality which suggests that the restraining principles are only caprice in another form. The incident upon which Mr Gissing has chosen to make his plot turn is so miserably sordid that it seems to contaminate the whole book. We cannot escape from its depressing influence, and the series oftragic events which follow it affect us like readings from the 'Police News.' The character of Richard Dagworthy, the manufacturer, in whose office Emily's
