For Gissing is at heart, in
his bones as the vulgar say, a thorough moralist and sentimentalist, an
honest, true-born, downright ineradicable Englishman. Intellectually his
own life was, and continued to the last to be, romantic to an extent that
few lives are. Pessimistic he may at times appear, but this is almost
entirely on the surface. For he was never in the least blase or ennuye. He
had the pathetic treasure of the humble and downcast and unkindly
entreated--unquenchable hope. He has no objectivity. His point of view is
almost entirely personal. It is not the _lacrimae rerum_, but the _lacrimae
dierum suorum_, that makes his pages often so forlorn. His laments are all
uttered by the waters of Babylon in a strange land. His nostalgia in the
land of exile, estranged from every refinement, was greatly enhanced by the
fact that he could not get on with ordinary men, but exhibited almost to
the last a practical incapacity, a curious inability to do the sane and
secure thing. As Mr. Wells puts it:--
[Footnote 12: Sometimes, however, as in _The Whirlpool_ (1897) with a very
significant change of intonation:--'And that History which he loved to
read--what was it but the lurid record of woes unutterable! How could he
find pleasure in keeping his eyes fixed on century after century of
ever-repeated torment--war, pestilence, tyranny; the stake, the dungeon;
tortures of infinite device, cruelties inconceivable?'--(p.
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