to be unceremoniously hustled into the rough and tumble of a noisy third.  Circumstances made him revolt against an anonymous start in life for a refined and educated man under such conditions.  They also made him prolific.  He shrank from the restraints and humiliations to which the poor and shabbily dressed private tutor is exposed—­revealed to us with a persuasive terseness in the pages of The Unclassed, New Grub Street, Ryecroft, and the story of Topham’s Chance. Writing fiction in a garret for a sum sufficient to keep body and soul together for the six months following payment was at any rate better than this.  The result was a long series of highly finished novels, written in a style and from a point of view which will always render them dear 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 select these aright, we feel sure that he will end by placing the work of George Gissing upon a considerably higher level than he has hitherto done.