Does not Gissing himself sum it up admirably, upon the lips of Mr. Widdowson in _The Odd Women_: 'Life has always been full of worrying problems for me. I can't take things in the simple way that comes natural to other men.' 'Not as other men are': more intellectual than most, fully as responsive to kind and genial instincts, yet bound at every turn to pinch and screw--an involuntary ascetic. Such is the essential burden of Gissing's long-drawn lament. Only accidentally can it be described as his mission to preach 'the desolation of modern life,' or in the gracious phrase of De Goncourt, _fouiller les entrailles de la vie_. Of the confident, self-supporting realism of _Esther Waters_, for instance, how little is there in any of his work, even in that most gloomily photographic portion of it which we are now to describe? During the next four years, 1889-1892, Gissing produced four novels, and three of these perhaps are his best efforts in prose fiction. _The Nether World_ of 1889 is certainly in some respects his strongest work, _la letra con sangre_, in which the ruddy drops of anguish remembered in a state of comparative tranquillity are most powerfully expressed. _The Emancipated_, of 1890, is with equal certainty, a _réchauffé_ and the least successful of various attempts to give utterance to his enthusiasm for the _valor antica_--'the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.' _New Grub Street_, (1891) is the most constructive and perhaps the most successful of all his works; while _Born in Exile_ (1892) is a key-book as regards the development of the author's character, a _clavis_ of primary value to his future biographer, whoever he may be. The _Nether World_ contains 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 _Comédie 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