t
fashionable restaurants, they are seen in expensive seats at the
theatre; they inhabit handsome flats--photographed for an illustrated
paper on the first excuse. At the worst, they belong to a reputable
club, and have garments which permit them to attend a garden party or
an evening "at home" without attracting unpleasant notice. Many
biographical sketches have I read during the last decade, making
personal introduction of young Mr. This or young Miss That, whose book
was--as the sweet language of the day will have it--"booming"; but
never one in which there was a hint of stern struggles, of the pinched
stomach and frozen fingers.'

[Footnote 3: Three vols., 1884, dedicated to M.C.R. In one volume
'revised,' 1895 (preface dated October 1895).]

[Footnote 4: Who but Gissing could describe a heroine as exhibiting in her
countenance 'habitual nourishment on good and plenteous food'?]

In his later years it was customary for him to inquire of a new author 'Has
he starved'? He need have been under no apprehension. There is still a
God's plenty of attics in Grub Street, tenanted by genuine artists,
idealists and poets, amply sufficient to justify the lamentable conclusion
of old Anthony a Wood in his life of George Peele. 'For so it is and always
hath been, that most poets die poor, and consequently obscurely, and a hard
matter it is to trace them to their graves.' Amid all these miseries,
Gissing upheld his ideal. During 1886-7 he began really to _write_ and the
first great advance is shown in _Isabel Clarendon_.[5] No book, perhaps,
that he ever wrote is so rich as this in autobiographical indices. In the
melancholy Kingcote we get more than a passing phase or a momentary glimpse
at one side of the young author. A long succession of Kingcote's traits are
obvious self-revelations. At the beginning he symbolically prefers the old
road with the crumbling sign-post, to the new. Kingcote is a literary
sensitive. The most ordinary transaction with uneducated ('that is
uncivilised') people made him uncomfortable. Mean and hateful people by
their suggestions made life hideous. He lacks the courage of the ordinary
man. Though under thirty he is abashed by youth. He is sentimental and
hungry for feminine sympathy, yet he realises that the woman who may with
safety be taken in marriage by a poor man, given to intellectual pursuits,
is extremely difficult of discovery. Consequently he lives in