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The tale behind the letter:

footnote to a literary squabble

On the 22nd of October, 1886, William Robertson Smith wrote to Edmund Gosse:

…the Standard article was enough to show the whole charge was a trumped up one. Anything more barefaced than that about blank verse I don’t remember to have seen. The man who did it is either capable of anything or incapable of anything. I have never known a writer on such a subject as yours who did not make some slips – E.B. experience has shewn me how many slips the best men make. You no doubt had your share of them; but they don’t touch the substance of your book. … I have not read the Quarterly & I don’t mean to do so. What was in the Standard was enough for me. Yours ever, W. R. Smith.[1]

As de facto editor of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Smith by this time was thoroughly accustomed to correcting the slips of numerous eminent yet lax contributors — a task he invariably performed with meticulous care. Gosse had already contributed several articles for the E.B. and, in an earlier letter of July, 1884,[2] Smith had congratulated him on his article on the subject of pastoral literature.[3] If there were any major errors or slips, these are not mentioned — but WRS tactfully offers one or two suggestions which Gosse clearly adopted, since they were subsequently incorporated in the printed text.[4]

Smith was to be only one of many from whom Gosse sought consolation and support, following a remarkable incident in 1886 which served to blight his self-esteem for virtually the rest of his life, in spite the numerous honours (a knighthood included) that were later bestowed on him. Until that year, Gosse had shown remarkable success in his early career as a writer, overcoming the severe disadvantages of an intensely constricting and cloistered upbringing, the details of which he was later to describe so memorably in the pages of Father and Son.[5] Lacking the benefits of a university education, Gosse skilfully used his youthful employment as a cataloguer in the British Museum[6] to gain the acquaintance of a wide circle of literary and artistic figures of the day, amongst whom were Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne and numerous members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. 

Gosse was highly ambitious and his assiduous social networking soon gained him entry to the fashionable salons of London. A natural aptitude for acquiring languages led in 1876 to his appointment as translator at the Board of Trade, and his knowledge of Norwegian enabled him to bring the plays of Ibsen to a fascinated English-speaking public. By 1884, Gosse had published several volumes of poetry and a variety of literary studies: these brought an invitation from Johns Hopkins University to present a short series of lectures in America, delivered to great acclaim at the turn of that year — which also saw him elected to the post of Clark Lecturer at Cambridge University.

His American lectures were hurried into publication in May 1885 by Cambridge University Press, under the title From Shakespeare to Pope: an inquiry into the causes and phenomena of the rise of Classical Poetry in England. Initial reviews in the Academy and elsewhere praised its mature and confident style while drawing attention to certain faults in the factual detail. Always highly sensitive to criticism, Gosse was stung by such relatively mild animadversions; but these were to prove nugatory by comparison with the effects of a thirty page review published in the Quarterly Review more than a year later.[7]

The initially unnamed author was one John Churton Collins, a friend of Gosse until then and a man no less ambitious for academic recognition. Collins had suffered a severe blow in 1885, however, on failing to secure the Merton chair in English Literature at Oxford and his vituperative but well-planned attack on Gosse was transparently inspired by scholastic rancour and envy. It remains an almost unparalleled specimen of critical diatribe, its tone set unmistakably by the opening sentences:

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. It is one more proof that those rapid and reckless innovations, which have during the last few years completely changed the faces of our Universities, have not been made with impunity.[8]

Collins’ deprecation of what he regarded as the fatally declining standards of university education formed only a prelude to his ad hominen onslaught on Gosse, whose work, according to the reviewer, encapsulated a deplorable trahison des clercs whereby the “perpetual craving for novelty” on the part of “a herd of scribblers” is a sure guarantee of “reputation and emolument” at the expense of  literary excellence:

Meanwhile all those vile arts which were formerly confined to the circulators of had novels and bad poems are practised without shame. It is shocking, it is disgusting to contemplate the devices to which many men of letters will stoop for the sake of exalting themselves into a factitious reputation. Indeed, things have come to such a pass, that persons of real merit, if they have the misfortune to depend on their pens for a livelihood, must either submit to be elbowed and jostled out of the field, or take part in the same scramble for notoriety, and the same detestable scramble for puffery.[9]

As to the volume under scrutiny, its “most mischievous characteristic” was “the skill with which its worthlessness is disguised”. With the most transparent irony, Collins conceded that From Shakespeare to Pope was well-produced in terms of its external features — it had, for example, “an excellent index” — but its factual and chronological blunders were “detestable”: and Collins proceeded at great length to itemise these, so taking the opportunity to parade his own superior knowledge of the finer points of prosody, style and classical sources used by the seventeenth century writers.

Gosse had indeed been guilty of numerous inaccuracies, although the bulk of these were slips in chronology and entirely characteristic of a rather attractive ‘broad brush’ approach to his theme which both afforded liveliness to his treatment of a dry subject and imparted a felicitous unity to the whole topic of how and why the literature of the Augustan Age had developed in England. Collins, however, was quick to counter any such defence:

Mr Gosse’s errors … are not mere slips of the pen, they are not clerical and superficial, not such as, casually arising, may be easily excused, but are, to borrow a metaphor from medicine, local manifestations of constitutional mischief. The ignorance which Mr Gosse displays of the simplest facts of Literature and History is sufficiently extraordinary, but the recklessness with which he exposes that ignorance transcends belief.”[10]

As Gosse’s biographer was later to write of the review: “Never were ‘conscientious criticism’ and ‘a painful duty’ so obviously combined with enjoyment”.[11] But the personal consequences for Gosse were serious. Always a prey to self-doubt, this public humiliation was far more than he could ever shrug off or entirely forget. His desperate need for comfort and reassurance was plainly betrayed in the letters he wrote and Robertson Smith’s response was typical of that expressed by most close allies: the substance of the book, they urged, was what mattered; the whole affair would, in effect, be a nine days’ wonder; and true friends would not lower themselves even to read the Quarterly’s review of the book.

Robert Louis Stevenson, who had first met Gosse in 1873 and who remained a firm friend until his own death in 1895, treated the matter with his customary light-hearted charm and, writing from America in 1888, could even afford to allude humorously to the incident:

…I must tell again the fate of Mrs Gosse’s thermometer. It hangs in our sitting room, where it has often marked freezing point and below; “See what Gosse says” is a common word of command. But the point is this: in the verandah hangs another thermometer, condemned to register minus 40° and that class of temperatures; and to him, we have given the name of the Quarterly Reviewer. I hope the jape like you.[12]

It says much for the enduring bond between the two men that Gosse could tolerate such a sally, since Charteris comments that “to make a Gosse” of oneself had by then become an established university slang phrase at Oxford.[13] At Cambridge, he remained a popular and respected lecturer until his tenure of what was in effect a time-limited professorial chair came to an end in 1889.

Gosse and Robertson Smith continued to correspond on literary topics and it is of interest that both RLS and WRS were among those rare individuals who could safely offer criticism to Gosse without fear of giving instant offence. In 1891, for example, Stevenson gently chides Gosse for “one or two carelessnesses” in the latter’s biography of his father Philip,[14] while Smith, in November, 1890, delicately offers the correction of numerous errors in Gosse’s translation of Greek words and phrases in a work by Tolstoy which his friend had rendered into English.[15] And it is a poignant comment on Smith’s determination to work on to the end that one of his very last letters, penned within weeks of his death in March, 1894, was a recommendation that Gosse should edit and publish the translation of some short stories by an obscure Belgian writer. Ruefully he observes: “That I write so long & incoherent a letter with  my own hand, which I can’t and oughtn’t to do, will prove that I am very much in earnest”.[16]