Kingcote, while Amy Reardon is a better observed Isabel, regarded from a slightly different point of view.  Jasper Milvain is, to my thinking, a perfectly fair portrait of an ambitious publicist or journalist of the day—­destined by determination, skill, energy, and social ambition to become an editor of a successful journal or review, and to lead the life of central London.  Possessing a keen and active mind, expression on paper is his handle; he has no love of letters as letters at all.  But his outlook upon the situation is just enough.  Reardon has barely any outlook at all.  He is a man with a delicate but shallow vein of literary capacity, who never did more than tremble upon the verge of success, and hardly, if at all, went beyond promise.  He was unlucky in marrying Amy, a rather heartless woman, whose ambition was far in excess of her insight, for economic position Reardon had none.  He writes books to please a small group.  The books fail to please.  Jasper in the main is right—­there is only a precarious place for any creative litterateur between the genius and the swarm of ephemera or journalists.  A man writes either to please the hour or to produce something to last, relatively a long time, several generations—­what we call ‘permanent.’  The intermediate position is necessarily insecure.  It is not really wanted.  What is lost by society when one of these mediocre masterpieces is overlooked?  A sensation, a single ray in a sunset, missed by a small literary coterie!  The circle is perhaps eclectic.  It may seem hard that good work is overwhelmed in the cataract of production, while relatively bad, garish work is rewarded.  But so it must be.  ’The growing flood of literature swamps every thing but works of primary genius.’  Good taste is valuable, especially when it takes the form of good criticism.  The best critics of contemporary books (and these are by no means identical with the best critics of the past and its work) are those who settle intuitively upon the writing that is going to appeal more largely to a future generation, when the attraction of novelty and topicality has subsided.  The same work is done by great men.  They anticipate lines of action; philosophers generally follow (Machiavelli’s theories the practice of Louis XI., Nietzsche’s that of Napoleon I.).  The critic recognises the tentative steps of genius in letters.  The work of fine delicacy and reserve, the work that follows, lacking the real originality, is liable to neglect, and may become the victim of ill-luck, unfair influence, or other extraneous factors.  Yet on the whole, so numerous are the publics of to-day, there never, perhaps, was a time when supreme genius or even supreme talent was so sure of recognition.  Those who rail against these conditions, as Gissing seems here to have done, are actuated consciously or unconsciously by a personal or sectional disappointment.  It is akin to the crocodile lament of the publisher that good modern literature is neglected by the public, or the impressionist’s lament about the great unpaid greatness of the great unknown—­the exclusively literary view of literary rewards.  Literature must be governed by over-mastering impulse or directed at profit.