Unobserved, they received, and
made their own preparations for utilising, the legacy of the mid-Victorian
novel--moral thesis, plot, underplot, set characters, descriptive
machinery, landscape colouring, copious phraseology, Herculean proportions,
and the rest of the cumbrous and grandiose paraphernalia of _Chuzzlewit,
Pendennis_, and _Middlemarch_. But they received the legacy in a totally
different spirit. Mark Rutherford, after a very brief experiment, put all
these elaborate properties and conventions reverently aside. Cleverer and
more docile, George Gissing for the most part accepted them; he put his
slender frame into the ponderous collar of the author of the _Mill on the
Floss_, and nearly collapsed in wind and limb in the heart-breaking attempt
to adjust himself to such an heroic type of harness.
The distinctive qualities of Gissing at the time of his setting forth were
a scholarly style, rather fastidious and academic in its restraint, and the
personal discontent, slightly morbid, of a self-conscious student who finds
himself in the position of a sensitive woman in a crowd. His attitude
through life was that of a man who, having set out on his career with the
understanding that a second-class ticket is to be provided, allows himself
to be unceremoniously hustled into the rough and tumble of a noisy third.
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