where fried fish and potatoes hissed in boiling grease,’ blossomed a pure white lily, as radiant amid mean surroundings as Gemma in the poor Frankfort confectioner’s shop of Turgenev’s Eaux Printanieres. 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 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.  It was before the days of typewriting, and the MS. of a three-volume novel was so compressed that one could literally put it in one’s pocket without the slightest inconvenience.’  The name is from Byron’s Elegy on Thyrza.]

    ’A street organ began to play in front of a public-house close by. 
    Grail drew near; there were children forming a dance, and he stood to
    watch them.