ar to the studious and the
book-centred. Upon the larger external rings of the book-reading multitude
it is not probable that Gissing will ever succeed in impressing himself.
There is an absence of transcendental quality about his work, a failure in
humour, a remoteness from actual life, a deficiency in awe and mystery, a
shortcoming in emotional power, finally, a lack of the dramatic faculty,
not indeed indispensable to a novelist, but almost indispensable as an
ingredient in great novels of this particular genre.[1] In temperament and
vitality he is palpably inferior to the masters (Dickens, Thackeray, Hugo,
Balzac) whom he reverenced with such a cordial admiration and envy. A 'low
vitality' may account for what has been referred to as the 'nervous
exhaustion' of his style. It were useless to pretend that Gissing belongs
of right to the 'first series' of English Men of Letters. But if debarred
by his limitations from a resounding or popular success, he will remain
exceptionally dear to the heart of the recluse, who thinks that the scholar
does well to cherish a grievance against the vulgar world beyond the
cloister; and dearer still, perhaps, to a certain number of enthusiasts who
began reading George Gissing as a college night-course; who closed _Thyrza_
and _Demos_ as dawn was breaking through the elms in some Oxford
quadrangle, and who have pursued his work patiently ever since in a
somewhat toilsome and broken ascent, secure always of suave writing and
conscientious workmanship, of an individual prose cadence and a genuine
vein of Penseroso:--

'Thus, Night, oft see me in thy pale career...
Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings,
And the night-raven sings.'

[Footnote 1: The same kind of limitations would have to be postulated in
estimating the brothers De Goncourt, who, falling short of the first
magnitude, have yet a fully recognised position upon the stellar atlas.]

Yet by the larger, or, at any rate, the intermediate public, it is a fact
that Gissing has never been quite fairly estimated. He loses immensely if
you estimate him either by a single book, as is commonly done, or by his
work as a whole, in the perspective of which, owing to the lack of critical
instruction, one or two books of rather inferior quality have obtruded
themselves unduly. This brief survey of the Gissing country is designed to
enable the reader to judge the novelist by eight or nine of his best books.
If we can