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):--

'He saw much company and all of low intellectual order; he had
purchased a bicycle and regarded it as a source of distinction, or
means of displaying himself before shopkeepers' daughters; he believed
himself a moderate tenor and sang verses of sentimental imbecility; he
took in several weekly papers of unpromising title for the chief
purpose of deciphering cryptograms, in which pursuit he had singular
success. Add to these characteristics a penchant for cheap jewellery,
and Oliver Peak stands confessed.'

The story of the book is revealed in Peak's laconic ambition, 'A plebeian,
I aim at marrying a lady.' It is a little curious, some may think, that
this motive so skilfully used by so many novelists to whose work Gissing's
has affinity, from Rousseau and Stendhal (_Rouge et Noire_) to Cherbuliez
(_Secret du Precepteur_) and Bourget (_Le Disciple_), had not already
attracted him, but the explanation is perhaps in part indicated in a finely
written story towards the close of this present volume.[15] The white,
maidenish and silk-haired fairness of Sidwell, and Peak's irresistible
passion for the type of beauty suggested, is revealed to us with all
Gissing's wond