Of the kisses--
'by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others'--
there are indeed many to be discovered hidden away between these pages. And
the beautiful verse has a fine parallel in the prose of one of Gissing's
later novels. 'Some girl, of delicate instinct, of purpose sweet and pure,
wasting her unloved life in toil and want and indignity; some man, whose
youth and courage strove against a mean environment, whose eyes grew
haggard in the vain search for a companion promised in his dreams; they
lived, these two, parted perchance only by the wall of neighbour houses,
yet all huge London was between them, and their hands would never touch.'
The dream of fair women which occupies the mood of Piers Otway in the
opening passage of the same novel, was evidently no remotely conceived
fancy. Its realisation, in ideal love, represents the author's _Crown of
Life_. The wise man who said that Beautiful Woman[27] was a heaven to the
eye, a hell to the soul, and a purgatory to the purse of man, could hardly
find a more copious field of illustration than in the fiction of George
Gissing.
[Footnote 27: With unconscious recollection, it may be, of Pope's notable
phrase in regard to Shakespeare, he speaks in his last novel of woman
appearing at times as 'a force of Nature rather than an individual being'
(_Will Warburton_, p.
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