Edmund William Gosse

“ The irritability of mankind, which easily forgets and neglects praise, but cannot forgive the rankling poison of blame, has set upon the word critic a seal which is even more unamiable than that of criticism. It takes its most savage form in Benjamin Disraeli’s celebrated and deplorable dictum, “the critics are the men who have failed in literature and art.” It is plain that such names as those of Aristotle, Dante, Dryden, Joshua Reynolds, Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold are not to be thus swept by a reckless fulmination. ”

“ For fifty years, and these the most glorious in the annals of Holland, these two streams of influence, one towards beauty and melody, the other towards lively comedy, ran side by side, often in the same channel, and producing a rich harvest of great works. It was in the house of the daughters of Roemer Visscher that the tragedies of Vondel and the comedies of Bredero, the farces of Coster and the odes of Huygens, alike found their first admirers and their best critics. ”

“ We come into clearer air when we cross the Aegean and reach the Athenian historians: Thucydides, whose priceless story of the Peloponnesian War has most fortunately come down to us; and Xenophon, who continued that chronicle in the spirit and under the influence of Thucydides, and who carried Greek prose to a great height of easy distinction. But it is with the practice of philosophy that prose in ancient Greece rises to its acme of ingenuity, flexibility and variety, proving itself a vehicle for the finest human thought such as no later ingenuity of language has contrived to excel. ”

“ No one did more to free English literature from the shackles of formalism; no one, among his contemporaries, pursued the poetic calling with so sincere and resplendent an allegiance to the claims of absolute and unadulterated poetry. Some English poets have turned preachers; others have been seduced by the attractions of philosophy; but Swinburne always remained an artist absorbed in a lyrical ecstasy, a singer and not a seer. When the history of Victorian poetry comes to be written, it will be found that his personality was, in its due perspective, among the most potent of his time ”

“ Huygens had little of the sweetness of Hooft or of the sublimity of Vondel, but his genius was eminently bright and vivacious, and he was a consummate artist in metrical form. The Dutch language has never proved so light and supple in any hands as in his, and he attempted no class of writing, whether in prose or verse, that he did not adorn by his delicate taste and sound judgment. A blind admiration for John Donne, whose poems he translated, was the greatest fault of Huygens, who, in spite of his conceits, remains one of the most pleasing of Dutch writers. ”

“ That this emotion may be, and often is, caused by bad style, by the mere tinsel of rhetoric and jangle of alliteration, is not to the point. The important matter is that it is caused by style, whether good or bad. Those juvenile ardours and audacities of expression which so often amuse the wise man and exasperate the pedant are but the effects of style acting on a fervid and unripe imagination. The deep delight with which a grown man of experience reads Milton or Dante is but the same phenomenon produced in different conditions. ”

“ It is boasted by the admirers of Flaubert that his style is an enamel, and those who say this perhaps forget that the beauty of an enamel resides wholly in its surface and not at all in the substance below it. This is the danger which lies in wait for those who consider too exquisitely the value and arrangement of their words. Their style becomes too glossy, too highly varnished, and attracts too much attention to itself. The greatest writing is that which in its magnificent spontaneity carries the reader with it in its flight ”

“ NOVEL (from novellus, diminutive of Lat. novus, new; through the Italian novella) , the name given in literature to a study of manners, founded on an observation of contemporary or recent life, in which the characters, the incidents and the intrigue are imaginary, and, therefore, “new” to the reader, but are founded on lines running parallel with those of actual history.
1. With the word novel is identified a certain adherence to the normal conditions of experience. A novel is a sustained story which is, indeed, not historically true, but might very easily be so. ”

“ No doubt it is still by his romances that Stevenson keeps the wider circle of his readers. But many hold that his letters and essays are finer contributions to pure literature, and that on these exquisite mixtures of wisdom, pathos, melody and humour his fame is likely to be ultimately based. In verse he had a touch far less sure than in prose. Here we find less evidence of sedulous workmanship, yet not infrequently a piercing sweetness, a depth of emotion, a sincere and spontaneous lovableness, which are irresistibly touching and inspiring. ”

“ By the opening of the 14th century the art of writing in the old noble language had become entirely lost, and it was not until the 17th century that it began to revive as an archaeological curiosity and a plaything for scholars. “For an Icelander of the present day to write modern history in saga style is a ludicrous absurdity,” and the splendid living prose of the 12th century remains unrelated, a strange and unparalleled portent in the history of European literature. Of its beneficial effect on later Scandinavian, English and even Teutonic style there can be no question. ”

“ TROUVÈRE, the name given to the medieval poets of northern and central France, who wrote in the langue d'oil or langue d'oui. The word is derived from the French verb trouver to find' or invent. The trouvéres flourished abundantly in the 12th and 13th centuries. They were court-poets who devoted themselves almost exclusively to the composition and recitation of a particular kind of song, for which the highest society of that day in France had an inordinate fondness. This poetry, the usual subject of which was some refinement of the passion of love, was dialectical rather than emotional. ”

“ He was deeply tinged with a spirit of classical learning that was much more genuine and nearer to the true antique than any that had previously been known in Holland. His own disciples called him the Dutch Martial, but he was at best little more than an amateur in poetry, although an amateur whose function it was to perceive and encourage the genius of professional writers. Roemer Visscher stands at the threshold of the new Renaissance literature, himself practising the faded arts of the rhetoricians, but pointing by his counsel and his conversation to the naturalism of the great period. ”

“ What strikes the reader of Sully-Prudhomme's poetry first and foremost is the fact that he is a thinker; and moreover a poet who thinks, and not a thinker who turns to rhyme for recreation. The most strikingly original portion of his work is to be found in his philosophic and scientific poetry. If he has not the scientific genius of Pascal, he has at least the scientific habit of mind and a delight in mathematic certainties. In attempting to interpret the universe as science reveals it to us he has created a new form of poetry which is not lacking in a certain grandeur. ”

“ Alexandre Dumas, under the direct influence of Sir Walter Scott, allowed his tropic imagination to revel and riot in brilliant chains of adventure. The imaginative novel was admirably conceived by George Sand. But it was Balzac who filled canvas after canvas with the astounding intensity of life itself, and who insisted with irresistible force that the function of the novel is to draw a consistent and unprejudiced picture of humanity under the strain of a succession of probable passions ”

“ Unfortunately none but inconsiderable fragments survive to display to us the qualities of Roman prose in its golden age. Happily, however, those qualities were concentrated in a man of the highest genius, whose best writings have come down to us; this is Cicero, whose prose exhibits the Latin language to no less advantage than Plato's does the Greek. ”

“ What makes that book a masterpiece is not the basis of adventure, but the superstructure of expression. The expression, however, could not have been built up on no basis at all, and would have fallen short of Flaubert's aim if it had risen on an inadequate basis. The perfect union is that between adequate matter and an adequate form. We will borrow from the history of English literature an example which may serve to illuminate this point. Locke has no appreciable style; he has only thoughts. Berkeley has thoughts which are as valuable as those of Locke, and he
has an exquisite style as well. ”

“ But the Greater Sagas, as they are called, the anonymous stories which followed the work of Ari and were completed in the 13th century, exhibit prose style in its most enchanting fullness, whether in the majesty of Njala, in the romantic art of Laxdaela, or in the hurrying garrulity of Eyrbyggia. There followed a vast abundance of sagas and saga writers. The great historian, Sturla (1214–1284) , is the latest of these classic writers of Iceland, and after his death there was a very rapid decline in the purity and dignity of the national prose. ”

“ The young lover of poetry, when first he encounters Swinburne's influence, is almost bound to be swept away by it; the wild, extravagant licence, the apparent sincerity, the vigour and the verve, cry directly to the aspirations of youth like a clarion in the wilderness. But, while this is inevitable, it is also true that the critical lover of poetry outgrows an unquestioning allegiance to the Swinburnian mood more quickly than any other of the diverse emotions aroused by the study of the great poets. ”

“ Alliteration takes a great part in the ornament of the style. The skill with which the story is told, the high romantic sense of honour and courage which is displayed, the quick turns of the dialogue, the brilliant evolution of the plot, all these give enduring charm to the more successful and ample of the sagas, and in the earlier examples these qualities are very rarely missing. ”

“ It is necessary at the threshold of an examination of the history of criticism to expose this laxity of speech, since nothing is more confusing to a clear conception of this art than to suppose that it consists in an effort to detect what is blameworthy. Candid criticism should be neither benevolent nor adverse; its function is to give a just judgment, without partiality or bias. A critic (κριτικός) is one who exercises the art of criticism, who sets himself up, or is set up, as a judge of literary and artistic merit. ”

“ Very late in life, through no fault of his own, financial ruin fell on the aged poet, and from 1658 to 1668—that is, from his seventieth to his eightieth year—this venerable and illustrious person, the main literary glory of Holland through her whole history, was forced to earn his bread as a common clerk in a bank, miserably paid, and accused of wasting his masters’ time by the writing of verses. ”

“ A confusion between form and matter has often confused this branch of our theme. Even Flaubert, than whom no man ever gave closer attention to the question of style, seems to dislocate them. For him the form was the work itself: " As in living creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour and external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, is a work of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just expression, the measure, the rhythm, the form in all its characteristics." ”

“ The peculiarity of Lamb’s style as an essayist was that he threw off the Addisonian and still more the Johnsonian tradition, which had become a burden that crushed the life out of each conventional essay, and that he boldly went back to the rich verbiage and brilliant imagery of the seventeenth century for his inspiration. It is true that Lamb had great ductility of style, and that, when he pleases, he can write so like Steele that Steele himself might scarcely know the difference, yet in his freer flights we are conscious of more exalted masters, of Milton, Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor. ”

“ In prose, that the meaning should be given is the primal necessity. But as it is found that a dull and clumsy, and especially a monotonous arrangement, of sentences is fatal to the attention of the listener or reader, it is needful that to plainness should be added various attractions and ornaments. The sentences must be built up in a manner which displays variety and flexibility. It is highly desirable that there should be a harmony, and even a rhythm, in the progress of style, care being always taken that this rhythm and this harmony are not those of verse, or recognizably metrical. ”

“ The periodical publication of Macaulay’s Essays in the Edinburgh Review went on until 1844; when we cast our eyes over this mass of brilliant writing we observe with surprise that it is almost wholly contentious. Nothing can be more remarkable than the difference in this respect between Lamb and Macaulay, the former for ever demanding, even cajoling, the sympathy of the reader, the latter scanning the horizon for an enemy to controvert. In later times the essay in England has been cultivated in each of these ways, by a thousand journalists and authors. ”

“ Flaubert is a writer who must always appeal more to other authors than to the world at large, because the art of writing, the indefatigable pursuit of perfect expression, were always before him, and because he hated the lax felicities of improvization as a disloyalty to the most sacred procedures of the literary artist. ”

“ For instance, an ill-inspired work in rhyme, or even a well-written metrical composition of a satirical or didactic kind, cannot be said to be poetry, and yet most certainly is not prose; it is a specimen of verse. On the other hand, a work of highly wrought and elaborately sustained non-metrical writing is often called a prose-poem. The fact that this phrase can be employed shows that the antithesis between prose and poetry is not complete, for no one, even in jest or hyperbole, speaks of a prose-verse. ”