ABSTRACT
Intellectual scepticism has had a fairly good turn in the novels of the present generation, and, whether the effect be for good or harm, fiction has done its best to justify the attitude ofdoubt. Hitherto, however, the religious sceptic has been presented in a suitably heroic guise. We have seen him throw off one by one, with firmness ifwith reluctance, the fetters of his early training, and emancipate himself from fond errors to which he was too brave and true still to cling. His courage has involved him in many difficulties, and in painful personal separations, but in no modern novel until now-so far as my observation goes-has the doubter paltered with his doubts or compromised matters with his conscience. Yet it is certain that there are many sceptics who outwardly conform to the beliefs of the multitude, and it is this side of the problem of intellectual doubt that Mr George Gissing gives us in Born in Exile. The case he describes is an extreme one. It is not that of a man who holds his doubts so lightly that he continues from force ofhabit to act as though he had none. Mr Gissing's Godwin Peak is a student, whose scepticism is well-reasoned and aggressive. The ungenial conditions of his life fostered, to begin with, a temperament naturally unsympathetic, and his intellect avenged itself upon easy-going humanity by upsetting its beliefs. But ambition was a strong element in Peak's character, and this in its turn was fostered by the passion of love. Far above him in the social scale, far removed from him, as he supposed, in intellectual sympathy, was the girl he wished to marry. It seemed to him that the only way to win her was to join the Church, and take holy orders. The reader will wonder how this was to be done without an absolute recantation ofhis heterodoxy; but that would have been too commonplace an expedient for a man ofPeak's mental resource. He preferred to try instead the more hazardous expedient of a double life, intellectual and moral; indeed,
the casuistical attractions of such a choice made it almost welcome to him. One must not disclose the lines of the story; but it goes without saying that honest human nature will rebel against intellectual deceit as much as against any other. The story is almost necessarily a melancholy one, but it is singularly able; and those readers who do not at an early stage give it up as dull will gratefully admit that it is brilliant. The cleverness of the book is attested by the fact that Godwin Peak neither forfeits the reader's sympathy nor wins his admiration. We take him for what he is; and though the whole result is unsatisfactory, it includes much that is worth having. There are many passages in the novel that would bear quotation. Here is one, which will serve the double purpose of indicating the intellectual quality of Peak's mindfor he is the speaker-and of Mr Gissing's style: 'I can't pretend to care for anything but individuals. The few whom I know and love are of more importance to me than all the blind multitude rushing to destruction. 1 hate the word majority; it is the few, the very few, that have always kept alive whatever ofeffectual good we see in the human race. There are individuals who outweigh, in every kind of value, generations of ordinary people.'
