In some measure my efforts at kindly speech
succeeded, and her "Ah, Cristo!" as she turned to go away, was not
without a touch of solace.'
[Footnote 14: Here is a more fully prepared expression of the very essence
of Biffen's artistic ideal.--_By the Ionian Sea_, chap. x.]
In 1892 Gissing was already beginning to try and discard his down look, his
lugubrious self-pity, his lamentable cadence. He found some alleviation
from self-torment in _David Copperfield_, and he determined to borrow a
feather from 'the master's' pinion--in other words, to place an
autobiographical novel to his credit. The result was _Born in Exile_
(1892), one of the last of the three-volume novels,--by no means one of 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.
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