EDMUND GOSSE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20922, 11 July 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

EDMUND GOSSE.

THE MAN.,

BY KOTARE,

Edmund Gosse died three years ago. For over half a century he had practised the craft, of letters and during most of that time he held an unassailed position among the mandarins. Few men have risen so easily to the high places of contemporary fame and only the elect handful have held their eminence so long. As the years mounted up he came naturally to assume something of the pontifical note. When a man becomes an institution he must speak ex cathedra. But there was no diminution of his powers. His biographer states that he had to put forth greater effort to maintain his high level l of energy and adds this singularly penetrating and beautiful footnote to his picture of Gosse in his latest years: "The pattern made by the sunshine was altering with the fall of the leaf." But. if that were so to the solicitou? love of his troops of friends, it was not apparent in the finished work by which the outsider had to judge him. His weekly essay in the Sunday Times was one of the outstanding things in contemporary journalism. For years it was one of the few contributions to literary criticism that, personally, I felt I could not afford to miss; and tho last of them, written from the hospital with the shadow of death creeping relentlessly nearer, was as rich in sound knowledge and critical insight and sense of style as anything he wrote in his prime. Just before the operation from which he never rallied he wrote a last note to an old friend. "You will think of me in this hour with sympathy and hope. There seems good reason to think I shall survive the shock. In any case, I am perfectly calm and able to enjoy the love which has accompanied rue through such long years and surrounds me still."

The Biography. " The Life and Letters of Edmund Gosse," by the Hon. Evan Charteris, presents an unusually graphic and appealing picture of a very attractive and very human man. After all, that is the chief value of a biography. What Gosse was as poet and essayist and literary historian and critic one has long been able to decide for oneself from the multitude of his books. His unfailing grace of style, his standards of value in literature and conduct, his urbanity, the immense range and depth of his scholarship, are there for all to see andv admire. He gave one lightning-flash revelation of the secret places of his heart in his brilliant , "Father and Son," the most remarkable contribution of our times'to the literature of autobiography, and, one is tempted to prophesy, one of the few books of our generation that will take its place among the English classics. But the man himself now stands revealed in a full-length, intimate portrait. His biographer has fulfilled the Cromwellian injunction to paint the warts and all. He has given us no undiluted paean of fulsome panegyric. He has avoided, too, -the modern method of concentrating on the defects and eccentricities. This is a Life after the saner, older fashion. And Gosse comes miraculously to life in these finely-written pages. It is clearly, indicated that he had what Thackeray calls a natural inclination toward the great. But the great must have friends as well as the rest of us, and Gosse gave at least as much in his friendships as he received. It is equally clear that he was abnormally sensitive and took bitter offence often where no offence was intended. There was a hard, vengeful streak in him that made him cherish a grievance and exact full payment, though he had to wait for years.

Defects. Sometimes he praised a man's book with rapturous superlatives in a private letter and then damned it with faint praise in the public press. When he was Librarian of the House of Lords his privileged position and his opportunities of associating on familiar terms with the men bearing the greatest names in the country led to an assumption of attitudes and duties that were not included in the official book of words, and he had to be reminded that the House of Lords did not belong to its librarian. But making every allowance for everything frankly admitted here, there is left a most attractive picture of a lovable, generous man, a delightful companion and a loyal friend. As a man, apart altogether from his literary work, there are three aspects of his life that stand out clearly in this biography. There is first his relation to his father. Perhaps the finest side of him is expressed here. Philip Henry Gosse was one of the great scientists of the early and mid-Victorian periods. He was the supreme English authority on certain branches of zoology. Edmund Gosse as a boy was his father's assistant on many a scientific exploration of the seashore, and did useful work, too, in his father's laboratory. But the biggest thing in Philip Gosse's busy life was his religion. He was a member of the Plymouth Brotherhood. He believed with all liis soul that the end of the world was at hand, and that any day the Lord would appear to gather to Himself the small company of the faithful who had kept themselves unspotted of the world. His Father.

Edmund responded eagerly to the overcharged religious atmosphere of his homo. There may have been heredity in it, but there was above all his profound affection and reverence for his father. He accepted all the shibboleths of the sect and became precociously pietistic and hortatory. When ho was appointed to the British Museum, his father tried to direct his life as he had done in their provincial home. He wanted to keep his son separate from the world; he arranged his friendships and solved all his difficulties in a voluminous, but affectionate correspondence. Gosse ran a Sunday school in a poor district in London, and for some time allowed his father to prescribe his manner of life. But Gosse was finding his own feet. There were instincts stirring in him that' his father's faith and his father's limited circle of companionship could not satisfy. For years ho remained under his father s tutelage. But his new environment was inducing a steady growth away from the simplicities of his father's household. The long correspondence does credit to them both. Gosse simply had to take his own path. His father was often intolerant and unsympathetic, but he was 'so obviously in earnest and prompted only by the noblest of motives that the brilliant son, already making some figure in literary London, still deferred to his opinions long after he had abandoned many of the articles of his father's faith. It was a difficult time for them both.

But mutual respect and affection brought them safely through. The older man had one of the keenest brains in England, and when it was plain that the end of the world was not coming on the date he had widely proclaimed, and when it was equally clear that Gosse had suffered nothing in his moral standards and his filial affection by his association with the maligned world, he agreed to drop the role of censor and to accept the easier position of proud and devoted father. Their relation,, as revealed in the letters published in the biography, is singularly beautiful; with the happiness of his own home life and the multitude of his friends it gave that atmosphere which accompanied him through such long years and gave him his quiet confidence when the last shadow fell.

The other foundations on which his life was built I shall consider next week.