ABSTRACT
Under a heavy leaden sky, a flat gray desolate expanse picked out with blurred unhappy spots of black-that is this world as Mr George Gissing sees and paints it. His work is like a picture by one color-blind. The drawing is accurate, painstaking, praiseworthy in every detail, but the whole impression is unnatural and distressing, for happily the consensus of the competent pronounce that grass is green and sky is blue. The one thing in literature comparable to his presentation of life is the starved, leprous-looking landscape Browning depicted in 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'. Naturally an artist with this vision
does not make pretty pictures for the walls of home. From this fact follows the other, that Mr Gissing has been working long for the recognition of his merit which is at last grudgingly accorded. Why, indeed, should the world give cordial approval to a man who apparently doubts and disapproves it?
