Father and Son [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION il;: I Edmund Gosse knew everyone; no one really knew Gosse. He dined with André Gide; corresponded with Henrik Ibsen; gossiped with Henry James; joked with Robert Louis Stevenson; and had tea with Thomas Hardy. When, in a quest for an academic position, he applied to Trinity College, Cambridge, for a lectureship, Tennyson, Browning, and Matthew Arnold wrote his letters of reference. Old age covered Gosse with honours, transforming him into that pitiful thing, the unsmiling, public man. He was the official representative of letters; a tame author. His friend, A. C. Benson, sighed over Gosse's bloodless biography of Algernon Charles Swinburne: 'It is the life of a fearless and ebullient little man, written by a man in an armchair who is afraid of everyone and everything—the shadow of fear lies over the whole book—fear of critics, fear of relations, fear of readers, fear of press-cuttings.'' In the 1910s and 1920s, to young writers he was a memento mori for the imaginative soul: might theirs wither like Gosse's.? There he emphatically was: a dismaying embodiment of the old guard. He had crucified poetry on the cross of respectability. No one believes a laureate will write a good poem, and Gosse was the laureate of belles lettres. Yet the good companion, the public figure, none of that conveys the inner stresses that turned Gosse's life into the affair of depth and shadow it truly was. Melancholy softened his outline, and made of his self-importance something ineffably depressing. That sadness came from a conflict that makes Gosse's story one of the most significant of the nineteenth century. And not just of the nineteenth century: Gosse's struggle resonates in our culture too, in ways that may yet surprise us. In one of Max Beerbohm's wickedly accurate caricatures, we find the perfect image of Gosse's doubleness. It is called 'The Old and the Young Self. The child Gosse, a small, yearning figure dressed like a Tolstoyan peasant, with a wild gesture cries out the words 'Are you saved?' to the aged Gosse, one stiff, bespectacled figure in ' Quoted in Ann Thwaite, Edmund Gosse (London: Seeker & W'arburg, 1984). 479-