But New Grub Street is rich in memorable characters and situations to an extent unusual in Gissing; Biffen in his garret—­a piece of genre almost worthy of Dickens; Reardon the sterile plotter, listening in despair to the neighbouring workhouse clock of St. Mary-le-bone; the matutinal interview between Alfred Yule and the threadbare surgeon, a vignette worthy of Smollett.  Alfred Yule, the worn-out veteran, whose literary ideals are those of the eighteenth century, is a most extraordinary study of an arriere—­certainly one of the most crusted and individual personalities Gissing ever portrayed.  He never wrote with such a virile pen:  phrase after phrase bites and snaps with a singular crispness and energy; material used before is now brought to a finer literary issue.  It is by far the most tenacious of Gissing’s novels.  It shows that on the more conventional lines of fictitious intrigue, acting as cement, and in the interplay of emphasised characters, Gissing could, if he liked, excel. (It recalls Anatole France’s Le Lys Rouge, showing that he, too, the scholar and intellectual par excellence, could an he would produce patterns in plain and fancy adultery with the best.) Whelpdale’s adventures in Troy, U.S.A., where he lived for five days on pea-nuts, are evidently semi-autobiographical.  It is in his narrative that we first made the acquaintance of the American phrase now so familiar about literary productions going off like hot cakes.  The reminiscences of Athens are typical of a lifelong obsession—­to find an outlet later on in Veranilda.  On literary reclame, he says much that is true—­if not the whole truth, in the apophthegm for instance, ’You have to become famous before you can secure the attention which would give fame.’  Biffen, it is true, is a somewhat fantastic figure of an idealist, but Gissing cherished this grotesque exfoliation from a headline by Dickens—­and later in his career we shall find him reproducing one of Biffen’s ideals with a singular fidelity.

’Picture a woman of middle age, wrapped at all times in dirty rags (not to be called clothing), obese, grimy, with dishevelled black hair, and hands so scarred, so deformed by labour and neglect, as to be scarcely human.  She had the darkest and fiercest eyes I ever saw.  Between her and her mistress went on an unceasing quarrel; they quarrelled in my room, in the corridor, and, as I knew by their shrill voices, in places remote; yet I am sure they did not dislike each other, and probably neither of them ever thought of parting.  Unexpectedly, one evening, this woman entered, stood by the bedside, and began to talk with such fierce energy, with such flashing of her black eyes, and such distortion of her features, that I could only suppose that she was attacking me for the trouble I caused her.  A minute or two passed before I could even hit the drift of her furious speech; she was always the most difficult of the natives to