BOOKMAN

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 423, 3 August 1928, Page 14

BOOKMAN

Sir Edmund Gosse

[From “The \ation and Athoneeum,” by Harold Nicolson.]

I READ of his death in the evening edition of the “Berliner Tageblatt.” They said that he had died the day before in London: that he had been born in 1849; that he had written several important books: that he was, in fact, the leading English essayist and critic. They gave a list of his main publications with all their Teutonic passion for facts: “‘Life of Jeremy Taylor’ (Macmillan), 1903: ‘On Viol and Flute’ (King), 1873: ‘Father and Son’ (Heinemann), 1908”: such were the landmarks that they gave, the tabulation of what, certainly, was a fine achievement. And it was accurately done. No French printer could have written out n list of English titles with such accuracy: the compositor of the “Berliner Tageblatt” had made no mistakes. Everything was absolutely accurate: 1849; 1873; 1879; JSS2; 1883; the dates followed each

other with insistent precision. My heart (for I was fond of Gosse and grateful to him) rose in revolt. He was anything but a precise man: he would have loathed this spiritless Teutonic precision: it bore so little resemblance to his own views on life: as an obituary it was both curt and false. I sat there, in Berlin, wondering how and if one could shape a true obituary of Edmund Gosse. Any form of tabulation would be misleading; his accuracies had been the accuracies nof of fact, but of interpretation.

The enduring impression which he will leave on those whom he befriended is one of gratitude. He -\Vas not a very amenable man, and he w*as often petulant. lie had a great deal of give, but little take. He winced away from imagined insults, and, being combative, he resisted with tooth and nail. Let this be said at the outset. Gosse had his enemies, and they were mostly of his own creating. He was surrounded, as he himself would have phrased it, “by a tremulous web of sensitiveness,” which thrust him into the defensive, the proud, the rancorous even, in cases where a little indifference would have kept him calm. “It is odd,” he said to me the other day, “about old age. I feel benign.” I said something about his unfailing kindness to all who asked him for advice. “Yes,” he murmured, “but such people are my friends. And now that I am old and dying, I feel a warm benignity for those who were not my friends. I hope”—he leant towards me and placed his hand on my knee—“l hope that you will have occasion one day to say something nice about Watts Dunton.” “And Churton Collins?” I asked, amused. “Well, Collins,” he hesitated, “well, Churton Collins will scarcely come your way.” It w r as at the end of October that I saw him last. He had been seriously ill with typhoid and pneumonia: he appeared to be physically uncertain, fumbling at the drawer in which he kept his cigars, fumbling slightly with a cigar-cutter, tottering, to my great distress, as he searched on some distant table for the matches. He rejected all assistance: he repudiated his increasing infirmities with petulant, but not querulous, disgust: he knew that intellectually and spiritually he retained the zest and fire of youth. “My illness,” he insisted, “has done me worlds of good.” He fumbled about the room looking for that matchbox. “Worlds of good, worlds of good,” he almost snapped at my solicitude. “There!” he exclaimed finally as he sank into a chair. He braced his back against the cushion: his glasses, that black glass in one eye, that scintillating glass in the other, danced with the firelight. “There!” he said again. And in a moment the zest of his limitless humanity, his genius for comprehension and portrayal, the actual virility and tension of his memory, took me back once more among the giants of the nineteenth century. 1849. “Father and Son.” But there was something more in Gosse than mere longevity, than mere literature. He was above all an opportunity—the greatest opportunity that I have ever enjoyed. His books, the actual velvet texture of his style, remain. His kindness, his erudition, his wit will all be chronicled. But there was something more than all this about him, something which I much fear may prove evanescent. He was a great producer, an unrivalled evocator of the past. The dead lived again as he spoke of them: in his presence, and through his interpretation, one communed again with the dead. The nineteenth century took shape and colour in the light of his mimicry, his genius for selection gave one just that anecdote which illumined in a flash. He could grumble with the growl of Tennyson, giving to the voice the exact burr and rumble of the Lincolnshire wold: he could flutter and shrill with the hands and tremolo of Swinburne; he could grin as Matthew Arnold grinned: or lower like Rossetti: and pat plump hands even as Browning patted in Trinity Gardens: or boom moralities like Huxley: or reflect the charming though senile gaiety of Monckton Milnes. “The poetry of Swinburne, my dear young man” (this is Huxley booming), “is the poetry of profligacy Composed for profligates.” And this to the young and eyelid-fluttering Gosse of 1872, who had imagined that with Huxley at least one might venture to *av what one thought. Or that bit about Charles Kingsley, so intimate with the ■apologist father, so brisk and_ protec-

tive with the nervous, somewhat pretentious son. (“As a boy,” Gosse said to me, “I was very pretentious. All my subsequent diffidence came from that.”) And the story of Mrs Browning calling after her marriage on the Carlyles. The Carlyles were in. (“The Carlyles,” added Gosse, “seem always to have been in.”) Mrs Browning gushed. (“Both the Brownings,” added Gosse, “always gushed.”) She assured Jane Carlyle that she enview her, yes, envied her, having been married to her genius for so many years, whereas she, Elizabeth Barrett, had known Robert for so short, though so delicious, a time. The little crab-apple mouth of Mrs Carlyle closed sharply. “Make no mistake,” she said, “my dear Mrs Browning. For three weeks we lived on the pleasures of hope. Since then we have lived on the pleasures of imagination.” Of all this, Robert Browning, patting plump hands in Trinity Gardens, had told Edmund Gosse in 1882. And each word, each gesture, each intonation had been remembered. And was reproduced. Memoirs and memorials may record the actual details of his wide experience and activity. Tradition only will retain the legend of his histrionic zest. He will figure in our literary history as a great stylist, as a great interpreter, as the autthor of one unquestioned English masterpiece. But for those who knew and appreciated him he will remain as the supreme oppoiv tunity. And, as always in such cases, as fin opportunity which was largely missed.

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