llectual 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.

Do you know that music of the obscure ways, to which children dance?
Not if you have only heard it ground to your ears' affliction beneath
your windows in the square. To hear it aright you must stand in the
darkness of such a by-street as this, and for the moment be at one
with those who dwell around, in the blear-eyed houses, in the dim
burrows of poverty, in the unmapped haunts of the semi-human. Then you
will know the significance of that vulgar clanging of melody; a pathos
of which you did not dream will touch you, and therein the secret of
hidden London will be half revealed. The life of men who toil without