ABSTRACT
Let anyone who has spent his life in writing novels consider the day which has now arrived for George Gissing. The fruit of his life stands before us-a row of red volumes. If they were biographies, histories, books about books even, or speculations upon money or the course of the world there would be no need for the peculiar shudder. But they bear titles like these-Denzil Quarrier, Born il1 Exile, New Grub Street; places and people that have never existed save in one brain now cold. They are only novels. It seems that there is genuine cause for shuddering when one's work takes this form. Dead leaves cannot be more brittle or more worthless than things faintly imagined-and that the fruit of one's life should be twelve volumes of dead leaves! We have one moment of such panic before the novels of George Gissing, and then we rise again. Not in our time will they be found worthless.
