Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

Some Diversions of a Man of
Letters, by

Edmund William Gosse This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere
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Title: Some Diversions of a Man of Letters
Author: Edmund William Gosse
Release Date: June 22, 2006 [EBook #18649]
Language: English
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SOME DIVERSIONS OF A MAN OF LETTERS
BY EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.
LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN 1920

First published October 1919 New Impressions November 1919;
February 1920

OTHER WORKS BY MR. EDMUND GOSSE
Northern Studies. 1879.
Life of Gray. 1882.
Seventeenth-Century Studies. 1883.
Life of Congreve. 1888.
A History of Eighteenth-Century Literature. 1889.
Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S. 1890.
Gossip in a Library. 1891.
The Secret of Narcisse: A Romance. 1892.
Questions at Issue. 1893.
Critical Kit-Kats. 1896.
A Short History of Modern English Literature. 1897.
Life and Letters of John Donne. 1899.
Hypolympia. 1901.
Life of Jeremy Taylor. 1904.
French Profiles. 1904.
Life of Sir Thomas Browne. 1905.
Father and Son. 1907.

Life of Ibsen. 1908.
Two Visits to Denmark. 1911.
Collected Poems. 1911.
Portraits and Sketches. 1912.
Inter Arma. 1916.
Three French Moralists. 1918.

TO
EVAN CHARTERIS

CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface: On Fluctuations of Taste 1
The Shepherd of the Ocean 13
The Songs of Shakespeare 29
Catharine Trotter, the Precursor of the Bluestockings 37
The Message of the Wartons 63
The Charm of Sterne 91
The Centenary of Edgar Allen Poe 101
The Author of "Pelham" 115
The Challenge of the Brontës 139

Disraeli's Novels 151
Three Experiments in Portraiture-- I. Lady Dorothy Nevill 181 II. Lord
Cromer 196 III. The Last Days of Lord Redesdale 216
The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 231
Some Soldier Poets 259
The Future of English Poetry 287
The Agony of the Victorian Age 311
Index 338

PREFACE:
ON FLUCTUATIONS OF TASTE
When Voltaire sat down to write a book on Epic Poetry, he dedicated
his first chapter to "Differences of Taste in Nations." A critic of to-day
might well find it necessary, on the threshold of a general inquiry, to
expatiate on "Differences of Taste in Generations." Changes of
standard in the arts are always taking place, but it is only with
advancing years, perhaps, that we begin to be embarrassed by the
recurrence of them. In early youth we fight for the new forms of art, for
the new æsthetic shibboleths, and in that happy ardour of battle we
have no time or inclination to regret the demigods whom we dispossess.
But the years glide on, and, behold! one morning, we wake up to find
our own predilections treated with contempt, and the objects of our
own idolatry consigned to the waste-paper basket. Then the matter
becomes serious, and we must either go on struggling for a cause
inevitably lost, or we must give up the whole matter in indifference.
This week I read, over the signature of a very clever and very popular
literary character of our day, the remark that Wordsworth's was "a
genteel mind of the third rank." I put down the newspaper in which this
airy dictum was printed, and, for the first time, I was glad that poor Mr.

Matthew Arnold was no longer with us. But, of course, the evolutions
of taste must go on, whether they hurt the living and the dead, or no.
Is there, then, no such thing as a permanent element of poetic beauty?
The curious fact is that leading critics in each successive generation are
united in believing that there is, and that the reigning favourite
conforms to it. The life of a reputation is like the life of a plant, and
seems, in these days, to be like the life of an annual. We watch the seed,
admiration for Wordsworth, planted about 1795, shoot obscurely from
the ground, and gradually clothe itself with leaves till about 1840; then
it bursts into blossom of rapturous praise, and about 1870 is hung with
clusters of the fruit of "permanent" appreciation. In 1919, little more
than a century from its first evolution in obscurity, it recedes again in
the raggedness of obloquy, and cumbers the earth, as dim old "genteel"
Wordsworth, whom we are assured that nobody reads. But why were
"the best judges" scornful in 1800 and again in 1919 of what gave the
noblest and the most inspiriting pleasure to "the best judges" in 1870?
The execution of the verse has not altered, the conditions of
imagination seem the same, why then is