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.]

The compulsion of the twin monsters Bread and Cheese forced hi