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 slums.  Hunger and Want show Religion and Virtue the door with scant politeness in this terrible book.  The material had been in his possession for some time, and in part it had been used before in earlier work.  It was now utilised with a masterly hand, and the result goes some way, perhaps, to justify the well-meant but erratic comparisons that have been made between Gissing and such writers as Zola, Maupassant and the projector of the Comedie Humaine.  The savage luck which dogs Kirkwood and Jane, and the worse than savage—­the inhuman—­cruelty of Clem Peckover, who has been compared to the Madame Cibot of Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons, render the book an intensely gloomy one; it ends on a note of poignant misery, which gives a certain colour for once to the oft-repeated charge of morbidity and pessimism.  Gissing understood the theory of compensation, but was unable to exhibit it in action.  He elevates the cult of refinement to such a pitch that the consolations of temperament, of habit, and of humdrum ideals which are common to the coarsest of mankind, appear to elude his observation.  He does not represent men as worse than they are; but he represents them less brave.  No social stratum is probably quite so dull as he colours it.  There is usually a streak of illusion or a flash of hope somewhere on the horizon.  Hence a somewhat one-sided view of life, perfectly true as representing the grievance of the poet Cinna in the hands of the mob, but too severely monochrome for a serious indictment of a huge stratum of our common humanity.  As in Thyrza, the sombreness of the ground generates some magnificent pieces of descriptive writing.

’Hours yet before the fireworks begin.  Never mind; here by good luck we find seats where we can watch the throng passing and repassing.  It is a great review of the people.  On the whole, how respectable they are, how sober, how deadly dull!  See how worn-out the poor girls are becoming, how they gape, what listless eyes most of them have!  The stoop in the shoulders so universal among them merely means over-toil in the workroom.  Not one in a thousand shows the elements of taste in dress; vulgarity and worse glares in all but every costume.  Observe the middle-aged women; it would be small surprise that their good looks had vanished, but whence comes it they are animal, repulsive, absolutely vicious in ugliness?  Mark the men in their turn; four in every six have visages so deformed by ill-health that they excite disgust; their hair is cut down to within half an inch of the scalp; their legs are twisted out of shape by evil conditions of life from birth upwards.  Whenever a youth and a girl come along arm-in-arm, how flagrantly shows the man’s coarseness!  They are pretty, so many of these girls, delicate of