lily, as radiant amid mean surroundings as Gemma in the poor Frankfort
confectioner's shop of Turgenev's _Eaux Printanières._ The pale and rather
languid charm of her face and figure are sufficiently portrayed without any
set description. What could be more delicate than the intimation of the
foregone 'good-night' between the sisters, or the scene of Lyddy plaiting
Thyrza's hair? The delineation of the upper middle class culture by which
this exquisite flower of maidenhood is first caressed and transplanted,
then slighted and left to wither, is not so satisfactory. Of the upper
middle class, indeed, at that time, Gissing had very few means of
observation. But this defect, common to all his early novels, is more than
compensated by the intensely pathetic figure of Gilbert Grail, the
tender-souled, book-worshipping factory hand raised for a moment to the
prospect of intellectual life and then hurled down by the caprice of
circumstance to the unrelenting round of manual toil at the soap and candle
factory. 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