[Footnote 1: The same kind of limitations would have to be postulated in
estimating the brothers De Goncourt, who, falling short of the first
magnitude, have yet a fully recognised position upon the stellar atlas.]

Yet by the larger, or, at any rate, the intermediate public, it is a fact
that Gissing has never been quite fairly estimated. He loses immensely if
you estimate him either by a single book, as is commonly done, or by his
work as a whole, in the perspective of which, owing to the lack of critical
instruction, one or two books of rather inferior quality have obtruded
themselves unduly. This brief survey of the Gissing country is designed to
enable the reader to judge the novelist by eight or nine of his best books.
If we can select these aright, we feel sure that he will end by placing the
work of George Gissing upon a considerably higher level than he has
hitherto done.

The time has not yet come to write the history of his career--fuliginous in
not a few of its earlier phases, gathering serenity towards its
close,--finding a soul of goodness in things evil. This only pretends to be
a chronological and, quite incidentally, a critical survey of George
Gissing's chief works. And comparatively short as his working life proved
to be--hampered for ten years by the sternest poverty, and for nearly ten
more by the sad, illusive optimism of the poitrinaire--the task of the mere
surveyor is no light or perfunctory one. Artistic as his temperament
undoubtedly was, and conscientious as his writing appears down to its
minutest detail, Gissing yet managed to turn out rather more than a novel
per annum. The desire to excel acted as a spur which conquered his
congenital inclination to dreamy historical reverie. The reward which he
propounded to himself remained steadfast from boyhood; it was a kind of
_Childe Harold_ pilgrimage to the lands of antique story--