wo du nicht bist ist das Glueck,’ his tricks of the brush in portraiture, his characteristic epithets, the dusking twilight, the decently ignoble penury, the not ignoble ambition, the not wholly base riot of the senses in early manhood.  In my own opinion we have here in The Scrupulous Father, and to a less degree, perhaps, in the first and last of these stories, and in A Poor Gentleman and Christopherson, perfectly characteristic and quite admirable specimens of Gissing’s own genre, and later, unstudied, but always finished prose style.

* * * * *

But a few words remain to be said, and these, in part at any rate, in recapitulation.  In the old race, of which Dickens and Thackeray were representative, a successful determination to rise upon the broad back of popularity coincided with a growing conviction that the evil in the world was steadily diminishing.  Like healthy schoolboys who have worked their way up to the sixth form, they imagined that the bullying of which they had had to complain was become pretty much a thing of the past.  In Gissing the misery inherent in the sharp contrasts of modern life was a far more deeply ingrained conviction.  He cared little for the remedial aspect of the question.  His idea was to analyse this misery as an artist and to express it to the world.

One of the most impressive elements in the resulting novels is the witness they bear to prolonged and intense suffering, the suffering of a proud, reserved, and over-sensitive mind brought into constant contact with the coarse and brutal facts of life.  The creator of Mr. Biffen suffers all the torture of the fastidious, the delicately honourable, the scrupulously high-minded in daily contact with persons of blunt feelings, low ideals, and base instincts.  ’Human cattle, the herd that feed and breed, with them it was well; but the few born to a desire for ever unattainable, the gentle spirits who from their prisoning circumstance looked up and afar, how the heart ached to think of them!’ The natural bent of Gissing’s talent was towards poetry and classical antiquity.  His mind had considerable natural affinity with that of Tennyson.[26] He was passionately fond of old literature, of the study of metre and of historical reverie.  The subtle curiosities of Anatole France are just of the kind that would have appealed irresistibly to him.  His delight in psychological complexity and feats of style are not seldom reminiscent of Paul Bourget.  His life would have gained immeasurably by a transference to less pinched and pitiful surroundings:  but it is more than doubtful whether his work would have done so.

[Footnote 26:  In a young lady’s album I unexpectedly came across the line from Maud, ‘Be mine a philosopher’s life in the quiet woodland ways,’ with the signature, following the quotation marks, ‘George Gissing.’  The borrowed aspiration was transparently sincere.  ‘Tennyson he worshipped’ (see Odd Women, chap. i.).  The contemporary novelist he liked most was Alphonse Daudet.]