The Life of Letters
The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse, by the [Harpers, $5.00]
William Archer: Life, Work and Friendships, by [Yale University Press, $5.00]
ANY understanding of the life of Sir Edmund Gosse, who died in 1928, must assuredly presuppose a reading of that most remarkable human document, his own account of childhood and early youth, called Father and Son, first, published anonymously in 1907. Its very existence has made the task of a biography of Gosse difficult rather than easy. But its existence also offers a key to the life of a man who, up to the day of death when almost eighty, was robustly concerned with the tides and currents of English literature.
Edmund Gosse was the son of Philip Gosse, eminent British zoölogist and religious fanatic. His childhood, lived in England, was one of utter isolation. ‘The home was full of taboos. The ordinary literature of infancy was denied him.’ At an early age, under the guidance of Ids father, he learned to use the microscope and ‘in natural history he found a substitute for Robin Hood and Jack the Giant Killer.’ He was early destined for the church, and was subjected from the beginning to a religious regimen so fantastic and unreasonable that it would surely have crippled in the small years a lesser will. It was the case of a starved soul imprisoned for the sins it might some day commit.
Although Edmund Gosse went to London at the age of seventeen in revolt against paternal discipline, as he himself has written, the letters on both sides which his biographer has here included show indeed that the breach between father and son was gradually closed. From the time of his marriage in 1875 until his father’s death, there is little reference to the pit of hell. Gosse rose rapidly to fame. He began as a clerk in the cataloguing section of the British Museum at a salary of £90 a year. The Museum was ‘a nest of singing birds.’ Coventry Patmore had left in 1865. Richard Garnett was there, and Theophile Marauds, and John Payne. Doors opened; opportunity knocked and was admitted. Study and knowledge of the Scandinavian languages, supplemented by visits to Denmark, secured him soon the post of Translator to the Board of Trade. Poems and articles grew into books. Friendships widened. He met Stevenson, Swinburne (a difficult friendship to recommend to his father!), Austin Dobson, Georg Brandes, Hans Christian Andersen, Rossetti, Leslie Stephen, and many others. His letters, lengthy, friendly, shrewd, winch form to a great extent the basis for Mr. Charteris’s excellent biography, run the gamut of the bookmen of his day. As he grew older, younger men came to him; Drinkwater, Scpiire, Philip Guedalla, and Siegfried Sassoon are among these. Max Beerbohm, assisted by several of his best caricatures (including the superb one on the presentation ot the Gosse bust), is there. Fifty years of English letters. This is a noble book; if not written with distinction, yet full of distinguished things.
Not so good a book, but of kindred interest, is the life of William Archer. It is unnecessary to compare the two men. Archer’s great service to literature, as is commonly known, was his admirable translation of the plays of Henrik Ibsen. He wrote, edited, and translated much besides, but the burden of his fame will rest on this. His critical writing, like that of Beerbohm in the Saturday Review, is an index of the theatre he knew. His play, The Green Goddess, which seemed at best a curious climax to a life absorbed in the active contemplation of the stage, is by no means the measure of his full stature. Of humor, it is not perhaps realized that Bernard Shaw credited him with ‘an unsleeping and incorrigible sense.’ To Barrie, certainly, it did not appear so. ’My grand ambition now,’ he wrote to Archer, ‘is to make you laugh — just once. The shaven (but not Shavian) member of that otherwise bearded trio (Archer, Walkley, and Shaw), he stood then, as he stands now, an independent and interesting figure. His life is here, but the letters which surround it are much the better part. Why not, if they include the following postal from G. B. S.?
‘STOCKHOLM. — I achieved the impossible — a meeting with Strindberg to-day. He said “Archer is not in sympathy with me.” I said “Archer wasn’t in sympathy with Ibsen either; but he could n’t help translating him all the same, being accessible to poetry, though otherwise totally impenetrable.” After some further conversation, consisting mainly of embarrassed silences and a pale smile or two by A. S. and floods of energetic eloquence in a fearful lingo, half French, half German, by G. B. S., A. S. took out his watch and said, in German: “At two o’clock I am going to be sick. The visitors accepted this delicate intimation, and withdrew.’
DAVID McCORD