never managed to get so far....  There’s one thing that I wish especially to see, and that is Holborn Viaduct.  It must be a wonderful piece of engineering; I remember thinking it out at the time it was constructed.  Of course you have seen it?’ The vulgar but not wholly inhuman Cartwright interior, where the parlour is resolved into a perpetual matrimonial committee, would seem to be the outcome of genuine observation.  Dagworthy is obviously padded with the author’s substitute for melodrama, while the rich and cultivated Mr. Athel is palpably imitated from Meredith.  The following tirade (spoken by the young man to his mistress) is Gissing pure.  ’Think of the sunny spaces in the world’s history, in each of which one could linger for ever.  Athens at her fairest, Rome at her grandest, the glorious savagery of Merovingian Courts, the kingdom of Frederick II., the Moors in Spain, the magic of Renaissance Italy—­to become a citizen of any one age means a lifetime of endeavour.  It is easy to fill one’s head with names and years, but that only sharpens my hunger.’  In one form or another it recurs in practically every novel.[12] Certain of the later portions of this book, especially the chapter entitled ‘Her Path in Shadow’ are delineated through a kind of mystical haze, suggestive of some of the work of Puvis de Chavannes.  The concluding chapters, taken as a whole, indicate with tolerable accuracy Gissing’s affinities as a writer, and the pedigree of the type of novel by which he is best known.  It derives from Xavier de Maistre and St. Pierre to La Nouvelle Heloise,—­nay, might one not almost say from the pays du tendre of La Princesse de Cleves itself.  Semi-sentimental theories as to the relations of the sexes, the dangers of indiscriminate education, the corruptions of wretchedness and poverty in large towns, the neglect of literature and classical learning, and the grievances of scholarly refinement in a world in which Greek iambic and Latin hexameter count for nothing,—­such form the staple of his theses and tirades!  His approximation at times to the confines of French realistic art is of the most accidental or incidental kind.  For Gissing is at heart, in his bones as the vulgar say, a thorough moralist and sentimentalist, an honest, true-born, downright ineradicable Englishman.  Intellectually his own life was, and continued to the last to be, romantic to an extent that few lives are.  Pessimistic he may at times appear, but this is almost entirely on the surface.  For he was never in the least blase or ennuye.  He had the pathetic treasure of the humble and downcast and unkindly entreated—­unquenchable hope.  He has no objectivity.  His point of view is almost entirely personal.  It is not the lacrimae rerum, but the lacrimae dierum suorum, that makes his pages often so forlorn.  His laments are all uttered by the waters of Babylon in a strange land.  His nostalgia in the land of exile, estranged from every refinement, was greatly enhanced by the 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:—­