m to write
novels the scene of which was laid in the one milieu he had thoroughly
observed, that of either utterly hideous or shabby genteel squalor in
London. He gradually obtained a rare mastery in the delineation of his
unlovely _mise en scene_. He gradually created a small public who read
eagerly everything that came from his pen, despite his economy of material
(even of ideas), and despite the repetition to which a natural tendency was
increased by compulsory over-production. In all his best books we have
evidence of the savage and ironical delight with which he depicted to the
shadow of a hair the sordid and vulgar elements by which he had been so
cruelly depressed. The aesthetic observer who wanted material for a picture
of the blank desolation and ugliness of modern city life could find no
better substratum than in the works of George Gissing. Many of his
descriptions of typical London scenes in Lambeth Walk, Clerkenwell, or Judd
Street, for instance, are the work of a detached, remorseless, photographic
artist realising that ugly sordidness of daily life to which the ordinary
observer becomes in the course of time as completely habituated as he does
to the smoke-laden air. To a cognate sentiment of revolt I attribute that
excessive deference to scholarship and refinement which leads him in so
many novels to treat these desirable attributes as if they were ends and
objects of life in themselves. It has also misled him but too often into
depicting a world of suicides, ignoring or overlooking a secret hobby, or
passion, or chimaera which is the one thing that renders existence
endurable to so many of the waifs and strays of life. He takes existence
sadly--too sadly, it may well be; but his drabs and greys provide an
atmosphere that is almost inseparable to some of us from our gaunt London
streets. In Farringdon Road, for example, I look up instinctively to the
expressionless upper windows where Mr. Luckworth Crewe spreads his baits
for intending advertisers. A tram ride through Clerkenwell and its leagues
of dreary, inhospitable brickwork will take you through the heart of a
region where Clem Peckover, Pennyloaf Candy, and Totty Nancarrow are
multiplied rather than varied since they were first depicted by George
Gissing. As for the British Museum, it is peopled to this day by characters
from _New Grub Street_.

There may be a perceptible lack of virility, a fluctuating vagueness of
outline about the characterisatio