A troublesome letter has
arrived by the morning's post and threatens to spoil the day; but he
takes a few turns up and down the room, shakes off the worry, and sits
down to write for hours and hours. He is at the sea-side, his desk at
a sunny bay window overlooking the shore, and there all the morning he
writes with gusto, ever and again bursting into laughter at his own
thoughts.'[7]
[Footnote 7: See a deeply interesting paper on Dickens by 'G.G.' in the New
York _Critic_, Jan. 1902. Much of this is avowed autobiography.]
The influence of Dickens clearly predominated when Gissing wrote his next
novel and first really notable and artistic book, _Thyrza_.[8] The figure
which irradiates this story is evidently designed in the school of Dickens:
it might almost be a pastel after some more highly finished work by Daudet.
But Daudet is a more relentless observer than Gissing, and to find a
parallel to this particular effect I think we must go back a little farther
to the heroic age of the _grisette_ and the tearful _Manchon de Francine_
of Henri Murger. _Thyrza_, at any rate, is a most exquisite picture in
half-tones of grey and purple of a little Madonna of the slums; she is in
reality the _belle fleur d'un fumier_ of which he speaks in the epigraph of
the _Nether World_.
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