Of the cluster of novelists who emerged from this school of ideas, the two
who will attract most attention in the future were clouded and obscured for
the greater period of their working lives. Unobserved, they received, and
made their own preparations for utilising, the legacy of the mid-Victorian
novel--moral thesis, plot, underplot, set characters, descriptive
machinery, landscape colouring, copious phraseology, Herculean proportions,
and the rest of the cumbrous and grandiose paraphernalia of _Chuzzlewit,
Pendennis_, and _Middlemarch_. But they received the legacy in a totally
different spirit. Mark Rutherford, after a very brief experiment, put all
these elaborate properties and conventions reverently aside. Cleverer and
more docile, George Gissing for the most part accepted them; he put his
slender frame into the ponderous collar of the author of the _Mill on the
Floss_, and nearly collapsed in wind and limb in the heart-breaking attempt
to adjust himself to such an heroic type of harness.

The distinctive qualities of Gissing at the time of his setting forth were
a scholarly style, rather fastidious and academic in its restraint, and the
personal discontent, slightly morbid, of a self-conscious student who finds
himself in the position of a sensitive woman in a crowd. His attitude
through life was that of a man who, having set out on his career with the
understanding that a second-class ticket is to be provided, allows himself
to be unceremoniously hustled into the rough and tumble of a noisy third.
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