is uncivilised’) people made him uncomfortable.  Mean and hateful people by their suggestions made life hideous.  He lacks the courage of the ordinary man.  Though under thirty he is abashed by youth.  He is sentimental and hungry for feminine sympathy, yet he realises that the woman who may with safety be taken in marriage by a poor man, given to intellectual pursuits, is extremely difficult of discovery.  Consequently he lives in solitude; he is tyrannised by moods, dominated by temperament.  His intellect is in abeyance.  He shuns the present—­the historical past seems alone to concern him.  Yet he abjures his own past.  The ghost of his former self affected him with horror.  Identity even he denies.  ’How can one be responsible for the thoughts and acts of the being who bore his name years ago?’ He has no consciousness of his youth—­no sympathy with children.  In him is to be discerned ’his father’s intellectual and emotional qualities, together with a certain stiffness of moral attitude derived from his mother.’  He reveals already a wonderful palate for pure literary flavour.  His prejudices are intense, their character being determined by the refinement and idealism of his nature.  All this is profoundly significant, knowing as we do that this was produced when Gissing’s worldly prosperity was at its nadir.  He was living at the time, like his own Harold Biffen, in absolute solitude, a frequenter of pawnbroker’s shops and a stern connoisseur of pure dripping, pease pudding (’magnificent pennyworths at a shop in Cleveland Street, of a very rich quality indeed’), faggots and saveloys.  The stamp of affluence in those days was the possession of a basin.  The rich man thus secured the gravy which the poor man, who relied on a paper wrapper for his pease pudding, had to give away.  The image recurred to his mind when, in later days, he discussed champagne vintages with his publisher, or was consulted as to the management of butlers by the wife of a popular prelate.  With what a sincere recollection of this time he enjoins his readers (after Dr. Johnson) to abstain from Poverty.  ‘Poverty is the great secluder.’  ’London is a wilderness abounding in anchorites.’  Gissing was sustained amid all these miseries by two passionate idealisms, one of the intellect, the other of the emotions.  The first was ancient Greece and Rome—­and he incarnated this passion in the picturesque figure of Julian Casti (in The Unclassed), toiling hard to purchase a Gibbon, savouring its grand epic roll, converting its driest detail into poetry by means of his enthusiasm, and selecting Stilicho as a hero of drama or romance (a premonition here of Veranilda).  The second or heart’s idol was Charles Dickens—­Dickens as writer, Dickens as the hero of a past England, Dickens as humorist, Dickens as leader of men, above all, Dickens as friend of the poor, the outcast, the pale little sempstress and the downtrodden Smike.

[Footnote 5:  Isabel Clarendon.  By George Gissing.  In two volumes, 1886 (Chapman and Hall).  In reviewing this work the Academy expressed astonishment at the mature style of the writer—­of whom it admitted it had not yet come across the name.]