Reardon and Harold Biffen. But the contrast between
Edwin Reardon, the conscientious artist loving his art and working for
its sake, and Jasper Milvain, the man of letters, who prospers simply
because he is also a man of business, which is the main feature of the
book and the principal support of its theme, strikes one throughout as
strained to the point of unreality. In the first place, it seems
almost impossible that a man of Milvain's mind and instincts should
have deliberately chosen literature as the occupation of his life;
with money and success as his only aim he would surely have become a
stockbroker or a moneylender. In the second place, Edwin Reardon's
dire failure, with his rapid descent into extreme poverty, is clearly
traceable not so much to a truly artistic temperament in conflict with
the commercial spirit, as to mental and moral weakness, which could
not but have a baneful influence upon his work.'

[Footnote 13: F. Dolman in _National Review_, vol. xxx.; cf. _ibid_., vol.
xliv.]

This criticism does not seem to me a just one at all, and I dissent from it
completely. In the first place, the book is not nearly so depressing as
_The Nether World_, and is much farther removed from the strain of French
and Russian pessimism which had begun to engage the author's study when he
was writing _Thyrza_. There are dozens of examples to prove that Milvain's
success is a perfectly normal process, and the reason for his selecting the
journalistic career is the obvious one that he has no money to begin
stock-broking, still less money-lending. In the third place, the mental and
moral shortcomings of Reardon are by no means dissembled by the author. He
is, as the careful student of the novels will perceive, a greatly
strengthened and improved rifacimento of 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