fact that he could not get on with ordinary men, but exhibited almost to
the last a practical incapacity, a curious inability to do the sane and
secure thing. As Mr. Wells puts it:--

[Footnote 12: Sometimes, however, as in _The Whirlpool_ (1897) with a very
significant change of intonation:--'And that History which he loved to
read--what was it but the lurid record of woes unutterable! How could he
find pleasure in keeping his eyes fixed on century after century of
ever-repeated torment--war, pestilence, tyranny; the stake, the dungeon;
tortures of infinite device, cruelties inconceivable?'--(p. 326.)]

'It is not that he was a careless man, he was a most careful one; it
is not that he was a morally lax man, he was almost morbidly the
reverse. Neither was he morose or eccentric in his motives or bearing;
he was genial, conversational, and well-meaning. But he had some sort
of blindness towards his fellow-men, so that he never entirely grasped
the spirit of everyday life, so that he, who was so copiously
intelligent in the things of the study, misunderstood, blundered, was
nervously diffident, and wilful and spasmodic in common affairs, in
employment and buying and selling, and the normal conflicts of
intercourse. He did not know what would offend, and he did not know
what would please. He irritated others and thwarted himself. He had no
social nerve.'

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