every bit of the care that his old friend Biffen expended upon Mr. Bailey, grocer.  He worked slowly, patiently, affectionately, scrupulously.  Each sentence was as good as he could make it, harmonious to the ear, with words of precious meaning skilfully set; and he believed in it with the illusion so indispensable to an artist’s wellbeing and continuance in good work.  It represented for him what Salammbo did to Flaubert.  But he could not allow himself six years to write a book as Flaubert did. Salammbo, after all, was a magnificent failure, and Veranilda,—­well, it must be confessed, sadly but surely, that Veranilda was a failure too.  Far otherwise was it with Ryecroft, which represents, as it were, the summa of Gissing’s habitual meditation, aesthetic feeling and sombre emotional experience.  Not that it is a pessimistic work,—­quite the contrary, it represents the mellowing influences, the increase of faith in simple, unsophisticated English girlhood and womanhood, in domestic pursuits, in innocent children, in rural homeliness and honest Wessex landscape, which began to operate about 1896, and is seen so unmistakably in the closing scenes of The Whirlpool.  Three chief strains are subtly interblended in the composition.  First that of a nature book, full of air, foliage and landscape—­that English landscape art of Linnell and De Wint and Foster, for which he repeatedly expresses such a passionate tendre,[24] refreshed by ’blasts from the channel, with raining scud and spume of mist breaking upon the hills’ in which he seems to crystallise the very essence of a Western winter.  Secondly, a paean half of praise and half of regret for the vanishing England, passing so rapidly even as he writes into ’a new England which tries so hard to be unlike the old.’  A deeper and richer note of thankfulness, mixed as it must be with anxiety, for the good old ways of English life (as lamented by Mr. Poorgrass and Mark Clark[25]), old English simplicity, and old English fare—­the fine prodigality of the English platter, has never been raised.  God grant that the leaven may work!  And thirdly there is a deeply brooding strain of saddening yet softened autobiographical reminiscence, over which is thrown a light veil of literary appreciation and topical comment.  Here is a typical cadenza, rising to a swell at one point (suggestive for the moment of Raleigh’s famous apostrophe), and then most gently falling, in a manner not wholly unworthy, I venture to think, of Webster and Sir Thomas Browne, of both of which authors there is internal evidence that Gissing made some study.

[Footnote 24:  ’I love and honour even the least of English landscape painters.’—­Ryecroft.]

[Footnote 25:  ’But what with the parsons and clerks and school-people and serious tea-parties, the merry old ways of good life have gone to the dogs—­upon my carcass, they have!’—­Far from the Madding Crowd.]