Dickens would have given a touch of the grotesque to Grail's
gentle but ungainly character; but at the end he would infallibly have
rewarded him as Tom Pinch and Dominie Sampson were rewarded. Not so George
Gissing. His sympathy is fully as real as that of Dickens. But his fidelity
to fact is greater. Of the Christmas charity prescribed by Dickens, and of
the untainted pathos to which he too rarely attained, there is an abundance
in _Thyrza_. But what amazes the chronological student of Gissing's work is
the magnificent quality of some of the writing, a quality of which he had
as yet given no very definite promise. Take the following passage, for
example:--
[Footnote 8: _Thyrza: A Novel_ (3 vols., 1887). In later life we are told
that Gissing affected to despise this book as 'a piece of boyish idealism.'
But he was always greatly pleased by any praise of this 'study of two
sisters, where poverty for once is rainbow-tinted by love.' My impression
is that it was written before _Demos_, but was longer in finding a
publisher; it had to wait until the way was prepared by its coarser and
more vigorous workfellow. A friend writes: 'I well remember the appearance
of the MS. Gissing wrote then on thin foreign paper in a small, thin
handwriting, without correction.
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