By the bye, Pinker has suggested to me that he should try to get all my works into the hands of some one publisher. I should like this, but I have a doubt whether the time has come yet. There is a curious blending of respect and contempt in the publishers' minds towards me, and I should like to see which sentiment will prevail. If the contempt, one must relinquish ambitions proved to be idle, and so attain a certain tranquillity—even if it be that of the workhouse. I was always envious of workhouse folk; they are the most independent of all.

Respect has prevailed; Messrs. Sidgwick and Jackson reprint the eight later works both well and cheaply. One, "Born in Exile," is to be bought upon railway bookstalls for sevenpence. Nevertheless it is his own word "respect" that seems to describe the attitude of the public towards him; he is certainly not popular; he is not really famous. If we may guess at the destiny of this new edition, we can imagine that it will find its way to houses where very few novels are kept. Ordinary cultivated people will buy them of course; but also governesses who scarcely ever read; mechanics; working men who despise novels; dons who place him high among writers of English prose; professional men; the daughters of farmers in the North. We can imagine that he is the favorite novelist of a great many middle-aged, sceptical. rather depressed men and women who when they read want thought and understanding of life as it is, not wit or romance. In saying this we are saying also that Gissing does not appeal to a great multitude; the phrase "life as it is" is always the phrase of people who try to see life honestly and find it hard and dreary. Other versions of life they reject. They are not, perhaps, in the majority, but they form a minority that is very respectable, and perhaps increasing.

If this is at all true of his readers.

what shall we say of the writer himself? There is a great difference between writing and reading, and Gissing was a born writer. When a novelist has been dead for some years and his books are gathered together we want as far as possible to stand where he stood; not to be moved by one character or one idea, but to grasp his point of view. His books are very sad; that is the first thing that strikes the reader. The ordinary excitement of guessing the end is scarcely to be indulged in. Conceive the most gloomy, yet natural, conclusion to every complexity, and you are likely to be right. He had, as most novelists have, one great theme. It is the life of a man of fine character and intelligence who is absolutely penniless and is therefore the sport of all that is most sordid and brutal in modern life. He earns, perhaps, a pound

a week. He has thrown up his job in an office because an editor has accepted one of his stories. He marries a woman of some refinement; they live in a couple of rooms somewhere off the Tottenham Court-road. In a short time they cannot pay the rent; they move; they sell pieces of furniture; they live off tea and bread and butter; then his books go; all day long, in spite of headache and sore throat, in bitter fog and clinging mist, the wretched man has to spin imaginary loves and imaginary jests from his exhausted brain. He has the additional agony of loving good writing; he can lose himself still in dreams of the Acropolis or in argument about Euripides. His wife leaves him, for the dirt repels her; at last his stuff has become too poor even to sell, and he dies knowing himself beaten on every hand.

Many readers, happily, rebound from their depression when the end is reached, exclaiming, "After all, this is only one side." There are quantities of people who have enough money to

avoid these horrors; a few who can command luxury. But what Gissing proves is the terrible importance of money, and, if you slip, how you fall and fall and fall. With learning, sensitive feelings, a love of beauty both in art and in human nature all the qualities that generally (one hopes) keep their possessor somehow afloathe descended to the depths where men and women live in vast shoals without light or freedom. What a strange place it is this Nether World! There are women as brutal as savages, men who are half animals, women still preserving some ghost of love and pity, men turning a stunted brain upon the problems of their lot. All the things that grow fine and large up here are starved and twisted down there; just as the squares and parks, and the houses standing separate with rooms measured off for different occupations, are shrivelled into black alleys, sooty patches of green, and sordid lodginghouses, where there is shelter, but only the shelter that pigs or cows have, not room for the soul. Without money you cannot have space or leisure; worse than that, the chances are very much against your having either love or intelligence.

Many writers before and after Gissing have written with both knowledge and sympathy of the poor. What, after all, is more stimulating to the imagination than the sight of great poverty or great wealth? There was Mrs. Gaskell, for instance, and Dickens; a score of writers in our own day have studied the conditions of their lives. But the impressive part about Gissing is that knowing them as he did he makes no secret of the fact that he hated them. That is the reason why his voice is so harsh, so penetrating, so little grateful to the ears. Can any one hate poverty with all their soul who does not hate the poor? "Some great and noble sorrow," he

writes, "may have the effect of drawing hearts together, but to struggle against destitution, to be crushed by care about shillings and sixpences . that must always degrade." There is no sentimentalism about the fundamental equality of men in his works. Adela Mutimer in "Demos," gazing at her husband's face opposite her, ponders thus; Gissing must often have thought the same:

It was the face of a man by birth and breeding altogether beneath her.

Never had she understood that as now; never had she conceived so forcibly the reason which made him and her husband and wife only in name. Suppose that apparent sleep of his to be the sleep of death; he would pass from her consciousness like a shadow from the field, leaving no trace behind. Their life of union was a mockery; their married intimacy was an unnatural horror. He was not of her class, not of her world; only by violent wrenching of the laws of nature had they come together. She had spent years in trying to convince herself that there were no such distinctions, that only an unworthy prejudice parted class from class. One moment of true insight was worth more than all her theorizing on abstract principles. To be her equal this man must be born again, of other parents, in other conditions of life. had no . . . She claims to aristocratic descent, but her parents were gentlefolk; that is to say, they were both born in a position which encouraged personal refinement rather than the contrary, which expected of them a certain education in excess of life's barest need, which authorized them to use the service of ruder men and women in order to secure to themselves a margin of life for life's sake. Perhaps for three generations ber ancestors could claim so much gentility; it was more than enough to put a vast gulf between her and the Mutimers. Favorable circumstances of upbringing had endowed her with delicacy of heart and mind not inferior to that of any woman living;

inated with an equal husband, the children born of her might hope to take their place among the most beautiful and the most intelligent. And her husband was a man incapable of understanding her idlest thought.

It would have been so much easier to lessen the gulf; so much more graceful to waive the advantages of three generations of gentle birth. But to hate the vices of the poor is the way to incite the best kind of pity. The measure of his bitterness is the measure of his love of good.

But there is nothing surprising in the fact that Gissing was never popular. However harsh and censorious people are in their daily actions, they do it unofficially as it were; they shrink from any statement of the creed that makes them act thus. In fiction particularly, which is a relaxation, like golf, they detest anything severe. It is part of their enjoyment to see others looking rosy and thus to feel somewhat rosier themselves. Gissing had no sympathy whatever with this common weakness. "No, no," he makes Biffen say in "New Grub Street," "let us copy life. When the man and woman are to meet for the great scene of passion, let it all be frustrated by one or other of them having a bad cold in the head, and so on. Let the pretty girl get a disfiguring pimple on her nose just before the ball at which she is going to shine. Show the numberless repulsive features of common decent life. Seriously, coldly; not a hint of facetiousness, or the thing becomes different." The novel that Biffen wrote on these lines is, of course, a failure, and eventually he takes his own life upon Putney Heath.

The reader, then, whose pleasure it is to identify himself with the hero or heroine, and to feel in some strange way that he shares their virtues, is completely baffled. His natural instinct is to find fault with the cynicism of the writer. But Gissing is no

cynic; the real cynics are the writers who have a trivial merry view of life, and make people easily content and drugged with cheap happiness. What good Gissing finds in human beings is absolutely genuine, for it has stood such tests; and the pleasures he allows them, the pleasures of reading, companionship, and a few comfortable evenings, glow with a warmth as of red-hot coals. His work has another quality that does not make for popularity either. His men and women think. When we seek the cause of his gloom is it not most truly to be found there? Each of the people who from cne cause or another has to suffer the worst bruises in the Nether World is a thinking creature, capable not only of feeling, but of making that feeling part of a view of life. It is not gone when the pain is over, but persists in the form of melancholy questionings, What is to be said for a world in which there is so much suffering? By itself this peculiarity is enough to distinguish Gissing's characters from those of other novelists. There are characters who feel violently; characters who are true types; witty characters, bad ones, good ones, eccentric ones, buffoons; but the thinking man has seldom had justice done to him. The great advantage of making people think is that you can describe other relationships besides the great one between the lover and the beloved. There is friendship, for instance: the relationship that is founded on liking the same books, or sharing the same enthusiasms; there is a relationship between one man and men in general. All these, it seems to us, Gissing has described with extraordinary fineness. It is out of these relationships that he makes the texture of his works. Loves have exploded; tragedies have fired up and sunk to ashes; these quiet, undemonstrative feelings between one man and another, one woman and another, persist; they

spin some kind of thread across the ravages; they are the noblest things he has found in the world.

low in tone.

Naturally Gissing practised what is generally called the English method of writing fiction. Instead of leaping from one high pinnacle of emotion to the next, he filled in all the adjoining parts most carefully. It is sometimes very dull. The general effect is very You have to read from the first page to the last to get the full benefit of his art. But if you read steadily the low almost insignificant chapters gather weight and impetus; they accumulate upon the imagination; they are building up a world from which there seems to be no escape; violence would have the effect of an escape. But thus it comes about that it is difficult to point to any scene or passage and demand admiration.

Do we

even single out one character among all his men and women to be remembered? He has no Jane Eyres, no Uncle Tobys. But here is a passage that is characteristic of his terse workmanlike prose, glowing at the heart with a kind of flameless fire:

Manor Park Cemetery lies in the remote East-end, and gives sleeping places to the inhabitants of a vast district.

The regions around were then being built upon for the first time; the familiar streets of pale, damp brick were stretching here and there, continuing London, much like the spreading of a disease. Epping Forest is near at hand, and nearer the dreary expanse of Wanstead Flats.

Not grief but chill desolation makes this cemetery its abode. A country churchyard touches the tenderest memories, and softens the heart with longing for the eternal rest. The cemeteries of wealthy London abound in dear and great associations, or at worst preach homilies which connect themselves with human dignity and pride. Here on the waste limits of that dread East, to wander among tombs is to go hand in hand with the stark and eye

For

less emblem of mortality; the spirit fails beneath the cold burden of ignoble destiny. Here lies those who were born for toil; who, when toil has worn them to the uttermost, have but to yield their useless breath and pass into oblivion. For them is no day, only the brief twilight of a winter sky between the former and the latter night. them no aspiration; for them no hope of memory in the dust; their very children are wearied into forgetfulness. Indistinguishable units in the vast throng that labors but to support life, the name of each, father, mother, child, is as a dumb cry for the warmth and love of which Fate so stinted them. The wind wails above their narrow tenements; the sandy soil, soaking in the rain as soon as it has fallen, is a symbol of the great world which absorbs their toil and straightway blots their being.

We are in the habit of throwing faults upon the public as though it were a general rubbish heap, for it cannot But to be bring an action for libel. unpopular is a sign that there is something wrong, or how have the classics come to be the classics? Gissing's public we believe to be a very good public, but it leaves out much that is good in the great public. The reason is that he wrote his best only when he was describing struggles and miseries and noble sufferings like those we have dwelt upon above. Directly he dealt with men and women living at ease he lost his grip; he did not see; directly he changed his sober prosaic prose for a loftier style he was without merit. He had a world of his own as real, as hard, as convincing as though it were made of earth and stone-nay, far more There so-but it was a small world.

is no such place as "the" world; no such life as "life as it is." We need only consider the result of reading too much Gissing; we want another world; we take down "Evan Harrington." Which is true that misery, or this magnificence? They both true;

are

The

everything is true that can make us believe it to be true. Beauty beyond all other beauty, horror beyond all other horror still lie hidden about us, waiting for some one to see them. thing that really matters, that makes a writer a true writer and his work permanent, is that he should really see. Then we believe, then there arise those passionate feelings that true books inspire. Is it possible to mistake books that have this life for books without it, hard though it is to explain where the difference lies? Two figures suggest themselves in default of reasons. You clasp a bird in your hands; it is so frightened that it lies perfectly still; yet somehow it is a living body, there is a heart in it and the breast is warm. You feel a fish on your line; the line hangs straight as before down into the sea, but there is a strain on it;

The Times.

it thrills and quivers. That is something like the feeling which live books give and dead ones cannot give; they strain and quiver. But satisfactory works of art have a quality that is no less important. It is that they are complete. A good novelist, it seems, goes about the world seeing squares and circles where the ordinary person sees mere storm-drift. The wildest extravagance of life in the moon can be complete, or the most shattered fragment. When a book has this quality it seems unsinkable. Here is a little world for us to walk in with all that a human being needs. Gissing's novels seem to us to possess both these essential qualities-life and completenessand for these reasons we cannot imagine that they will perish. There will always be one or two people to exclaim, "This man understood!"

A wide country; a country of big fields and little stunted trees, of low rolling hills and white-washed cottages, whose doors open on to the street. Of towns paved with cobble stones, through which on Saturdays surge flocks of heavy woolled sheep, herds of brown cattle; but a country of the wind-cold, biting, furious.

No soft, sensuous wind of the west, this, to lure men to ease and forgetfulness; that, safe hidden in a Devon combe, they may forget their falls and failures in the honey scent of the gorse, the perfume of the heather, the languid languorous heat of the sun.

But rather a wind, laden with salt of the German Ocean; freezing and drying all softness, dampness out of earth and sky, before whose blast the weakkneed and degenerate bow themselves as sheaves of corn at the putting in of the sickle. But the country that wind blows upon breeds men.

It blew hard one March afternoon, when the buds were waging unequal warfare between the rising force of the sap within them, and the deadly peril of the cold without. But the man and woman standing on the hilltop paid small heed to it, the woman was born and bred in this country, the wind was her earliest, oldest, playmate, the man was a sailor, and the wind was part of his life.

"We ought to go back now, your train is at 5.15," said the woman.

"Right, Marjorie." He turned with a sigh. "Heigho! Leave is good. We have had a rattling time together; you'll miss the hunting when you follow the ship, sweetheart?"

The woman looked up; gray eyes met blue in steady, direct gaze:

"That will be all right," the voice was clear, rather low. The man smiled, and his hand closed on the hand hanging by his side; the girl looked up