Gissing now turned to the submerged tenth of literature, and in describing it he managed to combine a problem or thesis with just the amount of characterisation and plotting sanctioned by the novel convention of the day.  The convention may have been better than we think, for New Grub Street is certainly its author’s most effective work.  The characters are numerous, actual, and alive.  The plot is moderately good, and lingers in the memory with some obstinacy.  The problem is more open to criticism, and it has indeed been criticised from more points of view than one.

‘In New Grub Street,’ says one of his critics,[13] ’Mr. Gissing has endeavoured to depict the shady side of literary life in an age dominated by the commercial spirit.  On the whole, it is in its realism perhaps the least convincing of his novels, whilst being undeniably the most depressing.  It is not that Gissing’s picture of poverty in the literary profession is wanting in the elements of truth, although even in that profession there is even more eccentricity than the author leads us to suppose in the social position and evil plight of such men as Edwin Reardon and Harold Biffen.  But the contrast between Edwin Reardon, the conscientious artist loving his art and working for its sake, and Jasper Milvain, the man of letters, who prospers simply because he is also a man of business, which is the main feature of the book and the principal support of its theme, strikes one throughout as strained to the point of unreality.  In the first place, it seems almost impossible that a man of Milvain’s mind and instincts should have deliberately chosen literature as the occupation of his life; with money and success as his only aim he would surely have become a stockbroker or a moneylender.  In the second place, Edwin Reardon’s dire failure, with his rapid descent into extreme poverty, is clearly traceable not so much to a truly artistic temperament in conflict with the commercial spirit, as to mental and moral weakness, which could not but have a baneful influence upon his work.’

[Footnote 13:  F. Dolman in National Review, vol. xxx.; cf. ibid., vol. xliv.]

This criticism does not seem to me a just one at all, and I dissent from it completely.  In the first place, the book is not nearly so depressing as The Nether World, and is much farther removed from the strain of French and Russian pessimism which had begun to engage the author’s study when he was writing Thyrza.  There are dozens of examples to prove that Milvain’s success is a perfectly normal process, and the reason for his selecting the journalistic career is the obvious one that he has no money to begin stock-broking, still less money-lending.  In the third place, the mental and moral shortcomings of Reardon are by no means dissembled by the author.  He is, as the careful student of the novels will perceive, a greatly strengthened and improved rifacimento of