Against this happy tendency, one has to set--in regard at least to some of them--tendencies less admirable. For, whilst the only kind of work that has a chance of engaging the attention of Sainte-Beuve’s ‘severe To-morrow’ is work that is original, individual, sincere, is it not a pity, because of another’s sudden success, to be unremittingly occupied with the exploitation of one particular world--to paint for ever, say, in violent and garish hue, or in deep shades through which no light can struggle, the life of the gutter? to paint it, too, with that distorted ‘realism’ which witnesses upon the part of its practitioners to _one thing only_, a profound conviction of the ugly! I talk, of course, not of the short stories of the penetrating observer, but of those of the dyspeptic pessimist, whose pessimism, where it is not the _pose_ of the contortionist--adopted with an eye to a sensational success of journalism, to a commercial effect--is hysteria, an imitative malady, a malady of the mind. The profession of the literary pessimist is already overcrowded; and if I name two writers who, though in different degrees, have avoided the temptation to join it--if I name one who knows familiarly the cheery as well as the more sombre side of Cockney character and life, Mr. Henry Nevinson, the author of the remarkable short-stories, _Neighbours of Ours_, and then again a more accepted student of a sordid existence--Mr. George Gissing, in _Human Odds and Ends_ especially--I name them but as such instances as I am privileged to know, of observant and unbiassed treatment of the subjects with which they have elected to deal.