ABSTRACT
Reviewers ought to deal harshly by Mr Gissing, for he takes up much of their time. He makes them read him. One has to go right through with Mr Gissing, from cover to cover. Yet it is done without complaining, the truth being that one feels a little the better for the task. It is a grateful business, after all, praising a workmanlike novel; and one always accompanies Mr Gissing with the comfortable feeling that he is a fine and fInished artist with a conscience, who will strive to entertain one with his best, from the beginning to the end of the journey. There is nothing trivial and nothing careless in him. He is serious, and on his mettle, from start to finish. He wastes no words, he is a precisian in style, never a decorative sentence disfigures his page. The worst that one can say of him is in the nature of a compliment, which is, that he is quite ready to present his characters unsympathetically in his unflinching resolve to present them faithfully.
