ning. But he had some sort
of blindness towards his fellow-men, so that he never entirely grasped
the spirit of everyday life, so that he, who was so copiously
intelligent in the things of the study, misunderstood, blundered, was
nervously diffident, and wilful and spasmodic in common affairs, in
employment and buying and selling, and the normal conflicts of
intercourse. He did not know what would offend, and he did not know
what would please. He irritated others and thwarted himself. He had no
social nerve.'

Does not Gissing himself sum it up admirably, upon the lips of Mr.
Widdowson in _The Odd Women_: 'Life has always been full of worrying
problems for me. I can't take things in the simple way that comes natural
to other men.' 'Not as other men are': more intellectual than most, fully
as responsive to kind and genial instincts, yet bound at every turn to
pinch and screw--an involuntary ascetic. Such is the essential burden of
Gissing's long-drawn lament. Only accidentally can it be described as his
mission to preach 'the desolation of modern life,' or in the gracious
phrase of De Goncourt, _fouiller les entrailles de la vie_. Of the
confident, self-supporting realism of _Esther Waters_, for instance, how
little is there in any of his work, even in that most gloomily photographic
portion of it which we are now to describe?

During the next four years, 1889-1892, Gissing produced four novels, and
three of these perhaps are his best efforts in prose fiction. _The Nether
World_ of 1889 is certainly in some respects his strongest work, _la letra
con sangre_, in which the ruddy drops of anguish remembered in a state of
comparative tranquillity are most powerfully expressed. _The Emancipated_,
of 1890, is with equal certainty, a _rechauffe_ and the least successful of
various attempts to give utterance to his enthusiasm for the _valor
antica_--'the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.' _New
Grub Street_, (1891) is the most constructive and perhaps the most
successful of all his works; while _Born in Exile_ (1892) is a key-book as
regards the development of the author's character, a _clavis_ of primary
value to his future biographer, whoever he may be. The _Nether World_
contains Gissing's most convincing indictment of Poverty; and it also
expresses his sense of revolt against the ugliness and cruelty which is
propagated like a foul weed by the barbarous life of our reeking s