Gosse and James: The Epistolary Record

Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 the chance to share this man's erudite perspective on the making of modern life—often revealed in vivid and entertaining vignettes—is worth it. Kathryn Rentz University of Cincinnati GÖSSE AND JAMES: THE EPISTOLARY RECORD Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse, 1882-1915: A Literary Friendship. Rayburn S. Moore, ed. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. $35.00 IN SELECTED LETTERS of Henry James to Edmund Gosse, 18821915 : A Literary Friendship, Rayburn S. Moore has provided us with an edition of 317 of the surviving 400 letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse and his family. Several of them have appeared before, at least in part, in the Lubbock and Edel editions of James's letters. But Moore has corrected these texts, where variations occur, and has provided 224 letters which have never been printed in full heretofore. (Seventeen of them are addressed to Mrs. Gosse.) Unfortunately, Gosse's correspondence to James went up in smoke in the great bonfire by which James, late in life, tried substantially to destroy the record of his private life. So the exchange here is distinctly one-sided. Furthermore, it is clear that, toward the end of James's life, the telephone somewhat supplanted their letter-writing. Henry James and Edmund Gosse met in 1879, soon became fast friends, and from 1883 onward exchanged frequent letters, even though both for a time lived in London and visited each other with great frequency. The correspondence reveals the expression of great affection and friendship, evidence of their close reading of each other's work, James's criticism of Gosse's writing, as well as the Master's obiter dicta touching other authors. James's career during this period is so well known that perhaps no resume of it need be rehearsed here. But it is perhaps worth remarking that Gosse's career and principal publications are usefully sketched out, in Moore's introduction and in his chronology of both writers' lives. Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) attained great celebrity in England as a poet, translator, literary historian, and critic. Such works as Viol and Flute (1873), Seventeenth-Century Studies (1883), From Shakespeare to Pope (1885), A History of Eighteenth-Century Literature (1889), A Short History of Modern English Literature (1898), Jeremy Taylor (1904), Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1917), and many 482 Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 others set this prolific author at the center of London literary life in his time. For a while he was the Clark Lecturer at Trinity College (Cambridge), and later he served as the librarian of the House of Lords, both positions that gave him great social prestige as well as literary distinction. For services to the nation he was knighted in 1925, made a commander of the French Legion of Honor, and awarded an honorary degree by the Sorbonne. It must of course be said that most of Gosse's work was short on scholarship and thin as criticism. Little of it has survived. What, then, is the value of James's correspondence to Gosse? For one thing, the volume opens up English literary life during the era of the Transition by concentrating our attention on two writers in the act of shaping and responding to the public taste. In addition, it discloses James in a relaxed mode, corresponding with a literate friend about matters of common creative interest. Most important, the volume contains stray literary insights and bits of workshop gossip that reveal James in the act of imaginative growth and development . Most engaging is James's response to Gosse's writing. While the affection is evident on every page, it is clear that James felt obliged to hold Gosse "up to a tremendous standard of literary responsibility ," principally because Gosse was sometimes undiscriminating in his choice of subjects, over-praised them in his criticism, and panted (socially) after dukes and duchesses. To Robert Louis Stevenson, James complained that Gosse had a "genius for inaccuracy" and a near-fatal "levity" that constantly threatened to undo him. So he took on an avuncular role and tried to keep his friend Gosse on the right track. If...