The influence of Dickens clearly predominated when Gissing wrote his next novel and first really notable and artistic book, _Thyrza_.[8] The figure which irradiates this story is evidently designed in the school of Dickens: it might almost be a pastel after some more highly finished work by Daudet. But Daudet is a more relentless observer than Gissing, and to find a parallel to this particular effect I think we must go back a little farther to the heroic age of the _grisette_ and the tearful _Manchon de Francine_ of Henri Murger. _Thyrza_, at any rate, is a most exquisite picture in half-tones of grey and purple of a little Madonna of the slums; she is in reality the _belle fleur d'un fumier_ of which he speaks in the epigraph of the _Nether World_. The _fumier_ in question is Lambeth Walk, of which we have a Saturday night scene, worthy of the author of _L'Assommoir_ and _Le Ventre de Paris_ in his most perceptive mood. In this inferno, amongst the pungent odours, musty smells and 'acrid exhalations from the shops where fried fish and potatoes hissed in boiling grease,' blossomed a pure white lily, as radiant amid mean surroundings as Gemma in the poor Frankfort confectioner's shop of Turgenev's _Eaux Printanières._ The pale and rather languid charm of her face and figure are sufficiently portrayed without any set description. What could be more delicate than the intimation of the foregone 'good-night' between the sisters, or the scene of Lyddy plaiting Thyrza's hair? The delineation of the upper middle class culture by which this exquisite flower of maidenhood is first caressed and transplanted, then slighted and left to wither, is not so satisfactory. Of the upper middle class, indeed, at that time, Gissing had very few means of observation. But this defect, common to all his early novels, is more than compensated by the intensely pathetic figure of Gilbert Grail, the tender-souled, book-worshipping factory hand raised for a moment to the prospect of intellectual life and then hurled down by the caprice of circumstance to the unrelenting round of manual toil at the soap and candle factory. Dickens would have given a touch of the grotesque to Grail's gentle but ungainly character; but at the end he would infallibly have rewarded him as Tom Pinch and Dominie Sampson were rewarded. Not so George Gissing. His sympathy is fully as real as that of Dickens. But his fidelity to fact is greater. Of the Christmas charity prescribed by Dickens, and of the untainted pathos to which he too rarely attained, there is an abundance in _Thyrza_. But what amazes the chronological student of Gissing's work is the magnificent quality of some of the writing, a quality of which he had as yet given no very definite promise. Take the following passage, for example:--