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.
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