The Critic : Edmund Gosse
The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse. By Evan Charteris. (Heinemann. 25s.) THE tale of Edmund Gosse as told by Mr. Evan Charteris is fascinating but all too short—(" Oh ! do put his letters down and go on with the story yourself ! " we instinctively cry as our hands weary of the weight of the volume).
Mr. Charteris introduces us to such delightful people, all distinguished and all at their best, and we meet them by such a charming fireside in the perfect comfort of a Victorian drawing-room with large windows opening on to the leafy and watery vistas of Regent's Park. The Gasses must indeed have been a very pleasing young couple when they first married ; Edmund, fresh from " the cold storage of English Puritanism," newly arrived in the mild Bohemia of William Morris and Alma Tadema and " Nellie " so beautiful with her Rossetti red hair, about whom her lover had written but a few months ago, " I believe that she has formed an ideal and that I am not far from approaching it." Lucky Edmund ! " She is extremely gentle and shy with sudden pert moments, from which last I hope great things." No wonder the literary world took them to its heart or that the " smart " world later on wooed them away.
At least a third of the letters should have been broken up, their purpose described, and their witticisms used to adorn Mr. Charteris's pages ! Everything Gosse wrote was exquisitely written, but when he was delicately constructing or conducting a friendship, or an intimacy by letter, his want of spontaneity is irritating. Some of the friendships broke in the making, and we feel what a lot of the work had been wasted 1 Friend-making is, however, a beautiful hobby, and it was only now and then that his hobby and his work clashed, the official criticism and the private friendship collided, and a breakage occurred. Then someone would ruefully say that Gosse " mocked in the market place what he worshipped in the woods," and feel for a moment that he was a flatterer and an insincere man. He was a flatterer but not insincere ; it is impossible to read this new estimate of his character and suspect him of real insincerity. -
Mr. Charteris regards his hero not only as an ardent and discerning lover of literature, " if the extent of the territory through which he ranges is visualized ; if we consider the charm and interest he has added to the study of literature, and the shrewd animation with which he has infused so great a variety of topics ; the temptation to place him in company with the foremost English critics is not easily to be resisted." He modifies this judgment somewhat by saying that " however high Gosse may rank as a critic it must be in a different category and under another tradition, than that of Hutton, Matthew Arnold, and Leslie Stephen." He did not want to know " the why of the why." To the depths of human consciousness, where the great questions are asked and the great conclusions are accepted, he could not penetrate. He knew this. The worst that could be said of him intellectually he said of himself. " If, indeed, I think at all, it is flashingly along the tip of the tongue or the pen." His power to gauge men's personalities as they showed in their work or as they affected it was amazing. He could visualise the living and conjure up the dead in a manner to delight both those who had read or seen them, and those who had not. He could make a picture of every man about whom he wrote, vivid, arresting, vraisemblant. Look at this portrait of Clough : Is it not probable that the strenuousness of Dr. Arnold blew through his docile pupil as through a flute, and that in Clough's ' sermons and admonitions,' and in all the extra- ordinary zeal with which he proselytized at Rugby, he was really more passive than active ? At all events, when he went to Oxford, where he stayed for ten years, as there was no one to lead him, he entirely ceased to be a leader." In later years when Carlyle had " taken Clough into the wilder. ness and left him there," Gosse declares that " the conscience of Clough ate him out like a white ant ; it completely hollowed him, so that if any leaned against him for spiritual support Clough sank in dust under the pressure."
Of Tolstoi he said, " he is a nodule of pure imaginative genius, floating about in a quite barbarous cocoon of folly." He calls the Sitwells, " that delightful but deleterious three." Mr. Charteris declares that Gosse was never " savage " in criticism yet he admits he could demolish. Here is an instance of demolition. He is reviewing Mrs. Watts-Dunton's Howe Life of Swinburne. " Let it not be imagined for a moment that I am reproving these revelations. I delight in them a, I delight in the snapshots of the newspapers "—and in a later passage, " On the other hand I am free to admit that in my desire to insist on the ineffable gusto and blaze of the unfettered Swinburne of the earlier period, I may have undervalued the gentle records of the long captivity."
Suffering all his life from spiritual fatigue resulting from his religiously over-worked boyhood, Gosse was able by means of an extraordinary gift of mental economy to make use of a disability. But of boyish recollections of that loving but exacting taskmaster, his father, and that exhausted little disciple and final apostate, himself, he wove a wonderful drama illustrative of two epochs. " Father and Son - established his right in perpetuity to a high place among men of letters. Where learning and not gifts were concerned his " economic " efforts were less successful. His scholarship was not solid. According to Mr. Charteris he lived always a little beyond his intellectual capital. The risky habit was bound some day to involve him in a calamity. He brought out a history of English Literature, From Shakespeare to Pope. Churton Collins reviewed it savagely in the Edinburgh. convicting the rival critic of several bad mistakes. Gosse felt he had been dealt with in a spirit of malice and derision by a man accustomed to accept his hospitality and whom he thought his friend. He put a good face on the matter but confessed that he went about feeling " as though he had been flayed." Just at this time came an invitation to stay with the Tennysons. He did not want to go but pulled himself together and went. " He arrived in the afternoon and was sent out into the garden, where he found a large party ; tea spread out at a trestle table. Tennyson at one end of it, and an empty chair near the other. To this he crept hoping to escape notice, but in vain. Tennyson boomed out at him, " Well, Gosse, would you like to know what I think of Churton Collins ? " This was worse than anything he had anticipated. He managed to mumble that he would. ." I think," Tennyson went on, " he's a Louse on the Locks of Literature." The phrase from such a source was infinitely restoring."
CECILIA TOWNSEND.
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