Good Gosse*

THE LIFE & LETTERS OF SIR EDMUND GOSSE--Evan Charteris--Harper ($5)./-

Only old England could have produced him. In no other country could Sir Edmund William Gosse (1849-1928) have been at the same time so respectable and so successful. And few men even in England have added knighthood** to their grey hairs by pursuing to the end such a hog-calling as a literary critic's. Evan Charteris's biography, which lets Gosse's own letters do most of the work, gives a fair picture of this peripatetic, ponderous but proficient policeman of Parnassus.

For nine years (1919-28) Gosse made the London Times Literary Supplement portentous and powerful by his often anonymous but always well-known presence; but he had many a row to hoe before he became head gardener. Son of an almost violently religious naturalist, he was teethed on doctrine but never got nearer the kingdom of heaven on earth than working a brief, unhappy while in one of Dr. Barnardo's London orphanages. A timid and touchy man, Gosse was not cut out to be a good mixer with the masses. He got a job in the cataloguing section of the British Museum, became successively London agent for U. S. Publisher Scribner, lecturer at Cambridge, Librarian of the House of Lords. Gosse, who loved the peerage, liked being its Librarian; was desolated when he was retired in 1914. Pedantic but not a first-rate scholar, Gosse once published a book (From Shakespeare to Pope) which was full of detectable howlers; they were detected. Gosse, wounded, quivering, became even more of a mimosa.

At times a caustic but never a savage critic, Gosse made his reputation by discriminating paeans in praise of established figures, but he wrote appreciatively of such contemporaries as Algernon Charles Swinburne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Andrew Lang, Thomas Hardy, George Moore and many a younger man. It was to Gosse that Swinburne divulged his famed outburst against Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose reported remarks had offended Swinburne. When Gosse learned that Swinburne had written to Emerson, he said: " 'I hope you said nothing rash.' 'Oh, no.' 'But what did you say?' I kept my temper. I preserved my equanimity.' 'Yes, but what did you say?' 'I called him,' replied Swinburne in his chanting voice, 'a wrinkled and toothless baboon who, first hoisted into notoriety on the shoulders of Carlyle, now spits and sputters on a filthier platform of his own finding and fouling.' "

Gosse was fond of correcting his friends' grammar. Once he remonstrated with George Moore for his use of the phrase "more than you think for." Moore replied: "Shakespeare uses it and my parlormaid uses it, and an idiom which Shakespeare and my parlormaid use is good enough for me. . . . Your own writing, my dear Gosse, would be improved by idiom.'' Says Biographer Charteris: "Gosse . . . was deeply offended, and many explanations were necessary to avert the danger which menaced a friendship of forty years." An admirer of Walt Whitman, Gosse visited the U. S. to lecture, called at Camden, N. J., and spent a friendly hour with the barbaric yawper.

Though Gosse once strongly objected to the "modern fashion" of making an unmarried mother heroine of a novel, he later became a great friend & admirer of Andre Gide, French champion of homosexuality. During the War Gosse was one of the distinguished visitors to the Front --"with what object," says Biographer Charteris, "is now not very apparent."

A slight man with weak eyes, a bulging forehead, downcast shoulders, a drooping mustache. Gosse was a splendid specimen of the bibliophile, as such was often caricatured by his inimitable young friend Max Beerbohm. Gosse's wife, whose jaw was stronger than Gosse's, took good care of him, presented him with one son, a brace of daughters. Biographer Charteris reproduces a photograph of the Gosse family at breakfast (see cut) which gives at a glance the atmosphere of domestic respectability, successful endeavor, solid comfort to which Gosse's temporal self attained. But the picture does him less than justice.

For by the time Death came to him in his 80th quiet year. Edmund Gosse had fulfilled the unperformed promise of many a chorister in the critical choir by becoming Dean.

/-Published July 22. **Also conferred by Norway, Sweden, Denmark for services to Scandinavian literature. *New books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U. S. publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular retail price ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 203 East 42nd St., New York City.

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