What Dr. Furnivall
might call the 'backward reach' of every one of these stories will render
their perusal delightful to those cultivated readers of Gissing, of whom
there are by no means a few, to whom every fragment of his suave and
delicate workmanship 'repressed yet full of power, vivid though sombre in
colouring,' has a technical interest and charm. Nor will they search in
vain for Gissing's incorrigible mannerisms, his haunting insistence upon
the note of 'Dort wo du nicht bist ist das Glueck,' his tricks of the brush
in portraiture, his characteristic epithets, the _dusking_ twilight, the
_decently ignoble_ penury, the _not ignoble_ ambition, the _not wholly
base_ riot of the senses in early manhood. In my own opinion we have here
in _The Scrupulous Father_, and to a less degree, perhaps, in the first and
last of these stories, and in _A Poor Gentleman_ and _Christopherson_,
perfectly characteristic and quite admirable specimens of Gissing's own
genre, and later, unstudied, but always finished prose style.
* * * * *
But a few words remain to be said, and these, in part at any rate, in
recapitulation. In the old race, of which Dickens and Thackeray were
representative, a successful determination to rise upon the broad back of
popularity coincided with a growing conviction that the evil in the world
was steadily diminishing.
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