The Nature of Edmund Gosse's Father and Son

270 THE NATURE OF EDMUND GOSSE'S FATHER AND SON By Philip Dodd (University of Leicester) . . . how much better Gosse would have been as a writer, how much more important he would have been as a man if only he had given freer rein to his impulses, if only his pagan and sensual joy had not been dashed by perpetual caution. ... He hints, he qualifies, he insinuates, he suggests, but he never speaks out, for all the world as if some austere Plymouth brother were lying in wait to make him do penance for his audacity. Virginia Woolf s assessment of Edmund Gosse with its stress on the struggle within him between pagan and puritan impulses offers a salutary corrective to those accounts which emphasize Gosse's participation in the science versus religion conflict. Indeed, I would suggest, in the wake of Virginia Woolf s perception, that many of Gosse's most interesting works are best viewed as acts of self-examination , in which he uses his ostensible subjects as masks behind which he can explore the conflict within him of pagan and Christian values. Compare the following passages:2 I was at one moment devoutly pious, at the next haunted by visions of material beauty and longing for sensuous impressions , In my hot and silly brain Jesus and Pan held sway together, as in a wayside chapel discordantly and impishly consecrated to Pagan and Christian rites. (Father and Son) The perennial conflict in his [Pater's] members, between his exquisite instinct for corporeal beauty on the one hand and his tendency to ecclesiastical symbol and theological dogma on the other. ... He was not all for Apollo, nor all for Christ, but each deity swayed in him, and neither had that perfect homage that brings peace behind it. ("Walter Pater") We have seen . . . that his [Swinburne's] imagination was always swinging, like a pendulum between the north and the south, between Paganism and Puritanism, between resignation to the instincts and an ascetic repudiation of their authority . (The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne) The early writings of Donne are reckless in language, sensuous in imagery, full of the pagan riot of the senses, and far indeed from any trace of the pietist of precisian. (The Life and Letters of John Donne) These passages clearly exhibit Gosse's preoccupation with the conflict between paganism and Christianity and, in so doing, they help us to place his work in the tradition to which it properly belongs: that important tradition of nineteenth-century literature, which David 271 DeLaura's splendid Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England has charted, and which takes as its subject "one of the great recurrent 'myths' of European history: the conflict of Apollo and Christ, Rome and Jerusalem, intelligence and belief, the secular and sacred impulses in society."3 Matthew Arnold is one of the major contributors to that tradition and, as several critics have noted, an important influence on Gosse: for instance James Woolf writes that "Gosse is in the tradition of Arnold in major ways: the principle of disinterestedness, the historical method, and the moral approach."^ Following the lead of Professor Woolf and others, I intend to explore further the importance for Gosse of his mentor, Arnold - "the prophet whom we loved and worshipped."5 I believe that Arnold's famous formulation of the Hebrew and Hellene debate influenced Gosse's comprehension of Puritanism and paganism, and propose to substantiate my conviction by analysing his most celebrated work, Father and Son. But Gosse is, of course, no mere imitator of Arnold and, in Father and Son, as I shall show, he develops Arnold's perceptions and makes his own sense of those two forces, paganism and puritanism, which had dominated his life. Certainly Gosse's puritan, middle-class parents, and especially his father with his "earnestness," jingoistic and anti-Catholic fervour, and "fanatical" religion (FS, 168, 39), share in general terms many of the characteristics of the type which is the object of so much of Arnold's criticism: "the middle-class Dissenter."6 Even Philip Gosse and his wife's understanding of education with their conviction that "the various forms of imaginative and scientific literature were merely...