[Footnote 12:  Sometimes, however, as in The Whirlpool (1897) with a very significant change of intonation:—­’And that History which he loved to read—­what was it but the lurid record of woes unutterable!  How could he find pleasure in keeping his eyes fixed on century after century of ever-repeated torment—­war, pestilence, tyranny; the stake, the dungeon; tortures of infinite device, cruelties inconceivable?’—­(p. 326.)]

’It is not that he was a careless man, he was a most careful one; it is not that he was a morally lax man, he was almost morbidly the reverse.  Neither was he morose or eccentric in his motives or bearing; he was genial, conversational, and well-meaning.  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