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 _Comedie
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
common to the coarsest of mankind, appear to elude his observation.
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