Each sentence was as good as he
could make it, harmonious to the ear, with words of precious meaning
skilfully set; and he believed in it with the illusion so indispensable to
an artist's wellbeing and continuance in good work. It represented for him
what _Salammbo_ did to Flaubert. But he could not allow himself six years
to write a book as Flaubert did. _Salammbo_, after all, was a magnificent
failure, and _Veranilda_,--well, it must be confessed, sadly but surely,
that _Veranilda_ was a failure too. Far otherwise was it with _Ryecroft_,
which represents, as it were, the _summa_ of Gissing's habitual meditation,
aesthetic feeling and sombre emotional experience. Not that it is a
pessimistic work,--quite the contrary, it represents the mellowing
influences, the increase of faith in simple, unsophisticated English
girlhood and womanhood, in domestic pursuits, in innocent children, in
rural homeliness and honest Wessex landscape, which began to operate about
1896, and is seen so unmistakably in the closing scenes of _The Whirlpool_.
Three chief strains are subtly interblended in the composition. First that
of a nature book, full of air, foliage and landscape--that English
landscape art of Linnell and De Wint and Foster, for which he repeatedly
expresses such a passionate tendre,[24] refreshed by 'blasts from the
channel, with raining scud and spume of mist breaking upon the hills' in
which he seems to crystallise the very essence of a Western winter.
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