understand, and in rage she became quite unintelligible.  Little by little, by dint of questioning, I got at what she meant.  There had been guai, worse than usual; the mistress had reviled her unendurably for some fault or other, and was it not hard that she should be used like this after having tanto, tanto lavorato!  In fact, she was appealing for my sympathy, not abusing me at all.  When she went on to say that she was alone in the world, that all her kith and kin were freddi morti (stone dead), a pathos in her aspect and her words took hold upon me; it was much as if some heavy-laden beast of burden had suddenly found tongue and protested in the rude beginnings of articulate utterance against its hard lot.  If only we could have learnt in intimate detail the life of this domestic serf[14]!  How interesting and how sordidly picturesque against the background of romantic landscape, of scenic history!  I looked long into her sallow, wrinkled face, trying to imagine the thoughts that ruled its expression.  In some measure my efforts at kindly speech succeeded, and her “Ah, Cristo!” as she turned to go away, was not without a touch of solace.’

[Footnote 14:  Here is a more fully prepared expression of the very essence of Biffen’s artistic ideal.—­By the Ionian Sea, chap. x.]

In 1892 Gissing was already beginning to try and discard his down look, his lugubrious self-pity, his lamentable cadence.  He found some alleviation from self-torment in David Copperfield, and he determined to borrow a feather from ‘the master’s’ pinion—­in other words, to place an autobiographical novel to his credit.  The result was Born in Exile (1892), one of the last of the three-volume novels,—­by no means one of the worst.  A Hedonist of academic type, repelled by a vulgar intonation, Gissing himself is manifestly the man in exile.  Travel, fair women and college life, the Savile club, and Great Malvern or the Cornish coast, music in Paris or Vienna—­this of course was the natural milieu for such a man.  Instead of which our poor scholar (with Homer and Shakespeare and Pausanias piled upon his one small deal table) had to encounter the life of the shabby recluse in London lodgings—­synonymous for him, as passage after passage in his books recounts, with incompetence and vulgarity in every form, at best ‘an ailing lachrymose slut incapable of effort,’ more often sheer foulness and dishonesty, ’by lying, slandering, quarrelling, by drunkenness, by brutal vice, by all abominations that distinguish the lodging-letter of the metropolis.’  No book exhibits more naively the extravagant value which Gissing put upon the mere externals of refinement.  The following scathing vignette of his unrefined younger brother by the hero, Godfrey Peak, shows the ferocity with which this feeling could manifest itself against a human being who lacked the elements of scholastic learning (the brother in question had failed to give the date of the Norman Conquest):—­