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.
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