My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (2 page)

In the ‘twenties as a member of his own club—the Savile—I saw him oftener. He was then in full enjoyment of a mellow St Martin's summer. At the age of sixty-six
he had had to retire from the Librarianship of the House of Lords. He was irritated at the time, but his release from official duties was in fact a benefit. He had more time for writing and for social activities. His links with European writers had been always close and during the war he acted as a literary ambassador between France and England, taking the chair for Frenchmen visiting London and himself addressing French audiences in Paris.

After the war honours came thick upon him. On his seventieth birthday he was presented with the bust of which a reproduction stands in the London Library. He was knighted, and as chief literary critic to the
Sunday Times
he could write within two columns' length exactly as he liked about any book he chose. Some of his best writing appeared there.

I have read recently one or two denigrating references to his qualities and capacities as a critic, and it cannot be denied that he was no more infallible in his judgement of contemporary writing than his predecessors were and his successors have proved to be. He was susceptible to personal influence. He liked to be courted, to be approached with deference. My father once asked him if he was interested in a certain young poet. ‘I have not been invited to take an interest in him,' was the reply.

But the qualities that make a man a good judge of contemporary writing make him as often as not a pedestrian writer. The best poets and novelists are usually erratic judges of each other's work. Wilde's definition of criticism as ‘the adventure of a soul among masterpieces' asks of the critic flashes of illuminating interpretation, and such flashes Gosse provided in full measure. He was fervent in his love of letters; widely read, he was human in his approach and he saw life itself on a broad scale. Much had he seen of men, climes, peoples, governments. He had wit and a large vocabulary. The
English language, in his hands, was a highly flexible and polished instrument. Books such as
Gossip in a Library
are very well worth re-reading. I doubt if anyone has written more readably about books and writers.

During the 1920s his many qualities had full scope. The
Sunday Times
gave him a forum. He had outlived his enemies. The young were gathered round him. He had glamour for them as the friend of Stevenson and Swinburne, of Tennyson and Hardy. They brought their books to him for his approval. Every Saturday he lunched at the same table at the Savile with old cronies, like Ray Lancaster. Against the background of his library and his pictures, in his charming house in Hanover Terrace looking over Regent's Park, he held court like royalty.

That is the Gosse whom Osbert Sitwell knew, and that is the Gosse who has found a niche in literary history. But it is a different Gosse that I remember. Through following the same profession as one's father, one acquires a panoramic outlook; one sees contemporary events and the rise and fall of reputations in the lengthened perspective of an added generation. When I think of Gosse I see him in terms of an episode largely forgotten now, which did in fact colour his later life and explains the eccentricities that marked his behaviour in his middle period. It took place in 1886 and it is worth recalling in a book which is primarily concerned with the rise and fall of literary reputations.

In the careers of most ambitious men there is a point when the formula of Greek tragedy is fulfilled and a man, through arrogance, through ‘hubris', incurs the irritation of the gods. Gosse was, then, in his middle forties and his career of unbroken success was at its peak. As a poet, as an essayist, as a lecturer, he was the object of an adulation that passed in places the boundaries of idolatry. No one sets much store by his poetry nowadays, but each new
volume was highly praised. He had a genius for friendship, and he was on close and affectionate terms with the best writers of his day.

Applicants for the post of Clark lecturer at Cambridge were required to support their claims with letters of recommendation from distinguished figures. There was competition to obtain as many signatures as possible. Forty or fifty was considered a modest quota. Gosse presented himself with three, Tennyson, Browning, and Matthew Arnold. He obtained the post.
^*

That post was the origin of his reverse. He was a great success at Cambridge. Under the aegis of his appointment, he was invited to lecture in America. It is very easy for an English visitor to have his head turned by American hospitality and American readiness to applaud success and welcome ‘the new thing',
^*
and Gosse lost momentarily his sense of focus, accepting the public's evaluation of his powers. ‘He was credited,' Charteris wrote, ‘with the authority of a learned scholar, a position which his knowledge, various and discriminating though it was, never really justified and at this time was far from supporting. It was assumed that anyone who wrote so well and ranged so widely must be erudite in the most specialized sense of the term. Scholarship was in fact being thrust upon him; he was driven to living beyond his intellectual capital.'

‘To adjust the minute events of literary history is tedious and troublesome,' Dr Johnson wrote. ‘It requires indeed no great force of understanding but often depends upon enquiries which there is no opportunity of making

Gosse was too creative, too original a writer to possess the meticulous painstaking caution of the scholar. He needed an editor who would closely check his manuscript for inaccuracies. But he was now so self-confident that he appears to have trusted his own memory in the very kind of book where accuracy is essential. Under the imprint of the Cambridge University Press, signing himself Clark Lecturer, he published
From Shakespeare to Pope: an enquiry into the causes and phenomena of the rise of Classical Poetry in England
. A book with such a title requires to be above suspicion, but Gosse in his self-assurance allowed slip after slip to go uncorrected.

It was the opportunity for which the many who envied him had been waiting and, in October 1886, there appeared in the
Quarterly Review
one of the most virulent and sustained attacks that has been delivered against a man of letters. Forty pages long, entitled ‘English Literature in the Universities', it purported to be a review of
From Shakespeare to Pope
and its opening paragraph contains the sentence: ‘That such a book as this should have been permitted to go forth into the world with the Imprimatur of the University of Cambridge affords matter for very grave reflection. But it is a confirmation of what we have long suspected.'

Churton Collins, the author of the article, was everything that Gosse was not. He was a great and meticulous scholar, but he was little else. When he died in 1908, Arnold Bennett wrote that ‘he was quite bereft of original taste. The root of the matter was not in him. The frowning structure of his vast knowledge overawed many people but it never overawed an artist unless the artist was excessively young and naïve… his essays were arid and tedious.'

Collins had been an unsuccessful applicant for the Merton Professorship of English at Oxford and his article was manifestly inspired by malice and ill will. At its close he wrote, ‘And now we bring to a conclusion one of the most disagreeable tasks that it has ever been our lot to undertake', but it is clear that he had relished every spiteful phrase. There were many of them. ‘Will our readers credit.…' ‘This is a University lecturer.…' ‘But this is nothing to what follows.…' ‘Our readers will probably believe us to be jesting when we inform them.…' ‘Not the least mischievous characteristic of the work is the skill with which its worthlessness is disguised.…' He compares Gosse with Mr Pecksniff. ‘About the propriety of his epithets, so long as they sound well, he never troubles himself.'

In tone the article is pompous and self-righteous, but there Churton Collins was in tune with the temper of his time, and when he refers to his victim's ‘habitual inaccuracy with respect to dates', he was well armed for the attack. ‘Of all offences of which a writer can be guilty,' Collins was able to write, ‘the most detestable is that of simulating familiarity with works which he knows only at second-hand or of which he knows nothing more than the title. That a lecturer on English Literature should not know whether the Arcadia of Sidney and the Oceana of Harrington are in prose or verse or, not knowing, should not have taken the trouble to ascertain, is discreditable enough, but that he should under the impression that they are poems, have had the effrontery to sit in judgement on them, might well in Macaulay's favourite phrase, make us ashamed of our species.

‘Unless the Universities give care to the teaching of English,' the article concluded, ‘so long will our presses continue to pour forth such books as the books on which we have been animadverting and so long will our leading
literary journals pronounce them “volumes not to be glanced over and thrown aside but to be read twice and consulted often”.'

The article caused a great sensation. Letters were written to the Press. No man knows who his friends are till he is in trouble. Gosse had always recognized the hostility of the Henley group, but many whom he had thought his friends had been secretly envious of his success and now joined the chorus of contumely. Gosse in his dismay and indignation may have exaggerated the extent of the calamity, as when a few weeks later he was bewailing to Thomas Hardy that, ‘my little influence for good is almost gone', but there is small doubt that his prestige at that moment stood perilously low. His income dropped. Editors were no longer so anxious to employ his pen. At Oxford it became a stock saying for anyone who had made ‘a howler' that he had made ‘a Gosse of himself'. And a ludicrous sidelight on the situation is provided by his cook's giving notice because she did not like seeing ‘the master's name so often in the papers'.

Gosse never got over the attack. It affected his entire conduct. He became hypersensitive to criticism. Warm-hearted and affectionate by nature he was on his guard against betrayal, considering it disloyal of a friend to praise in print someone whom he held to be an enemy. With most of his friends, during the 1890s there were periods of estrangement when something written or repeated had been misunderstood.

My father shared an experience that was nearly universal. He had written an article that rather pleased him, and in the course of casual talk mentioned it to Gosse, saying he would like him to look at it. Two days later he received a biting letter from Gosse saying that while he recognized that a working journalist had to accept whatever commissions he was offered, he did not see why his
attention should be called ‘to such lucubrations'. My father had presumably written a kindly word about someone who, unknown to him, had forfeited Gosse's regard. My father hit back, and there was a two years' schism.

Gosse never overcame the sensitiveness to criticism which Collins's article created, yet he gauged correctly not only the limited extent of the damage that it could do him but the nature of his own fallibility; and later he found a parallel for his own position in Ralph Brook's attack on Camden's
Britannia
. In an essay in
Gossip in a Library
Gosse referred to the ‘very hasty pamphlet which created a fine storm in an antiquarian teapot'. This attack was the work of a man who would otherwise be forgotten, who was jealous when Camden was promoted over his head to be Clarenceux King-of-Arms. Camden, like Gosse, was guilty of a number of small inaccuracies, and how accurately Gosse diagnosed his own weakness when he wrote that ‘Camden had sailed too long in fair weather' and ‘needed a squall to recall him to the duties of the helm'. How completely has Gosse's prophecy been fulfilled. Is Churton Collins remembered today for anything except his attack on Gosse?

The incident has its significance in literary history. It shows that attacks are soon forgotten provided the object of them continues to produce works of quality. There is only one answer to attack, to write a better book next time.

E. TEMPLE THURSTON, DESMOND COKE, ERNEST RHYS

My brother Evelyn and myself—Evelyn was born in October 1903—were brought up in an atmosphere not only of books but of professional writing. We lived in Hampstead on the edge of the Heath in a house called Underhill and our father invariably returned at the end of the day with a new book under his arm—one that he had for review or one that Chapman & Hall had published. His conversation with my mother turned on office problems, on difficulties with a bookseller or an agent, or an author's reluctance to ‘tone down' a manuscript.

My father was convivial and hospitable. But he was asthmatic and in consequence reluctant to go out at night in winter. In later years his deafness made him avoid large gatherings, but he loved having his friends round him. Most Sundays there would be visitors. Occasionally one or two would stay on to supper. Most of these friends would in my father's house avail themselves of their chance of learning about this and the other authoress and author. Writers provide material for gossip. The reader forms a mental picture of his favourite author. He wants to know what So-and-so is ‘really like'. He is also inquisitive about an author's earnings. ‘How much did So-and-so make out of that?'

I was continually listening to literary ‘shop'. I was brought up to think of literature as a profession, almost as a trade. I used to hear how this writer's stock was going up, while that other's was going down. I was
clothed and fed, housed and educated by my father's pen. There did not seem to me to be anything peculiar about a man being a writer. On the contrary, it seemed to me to be a most natural occupation.

As a schoolboy I was read poetry by my father almost every evening; I have seldom heard poetry read as well, and never better; I heard much talk of publishing and the auction-room of letters, but I am surprised, in retrospect, that so few authors should have come out to Under-hill. During the ten years before the war, Chapman & Hall published a number of prominent writers, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett—
The Old Wives' Tale
was on their list—Somerset Maugham, Sheila Kaye-Smith, but none of them ever sat in his oak-panelled book-room with its warm red lamps. This was in part because of his resolve to forget his office in his home at night, and partly in order to keep business and friendship separate. He had a great distaste for calculated hospitality. ‘I know,' he would say, ‘why Johnson's asking me to lunch. He wants me to send a MS. to the Ipswich Press.' Johnson was a shareholder in Chapman & Hall. The Ipswich Press, which he managed, was every bit as good and no more expensive than any other firm. There was no reason why Johnson should not have had his share of the firm's printing and several very good reasons why he should, but my father hated the idea of a lunch party having a commercial aspect; business, he felt, should be transacted in an office. He did not until his very last years have an entertainment expense account. To him the home was sacrosanct. The only two of his authors whom I remember meeting as a schoolboy were E. Temple Thurston and Desmond Coke.