Sir Edmund Gosse and his Modern Readers: The Continued Appeal of Father and Son

Sir Edmund Gosse and his Modern Readers: The Continued Appeal of Father and SonAuthor(s): Peter AllenSource: ELH, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Summer, 1988), pp. 487-503Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2873214 .

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SIR EDMUND GOSSE AND HIS MODERN READERS: THE CONTINUED APPEAL OF FATHER AND SON

BY PETER ALLEN

I

At the beginning of Father and Son Sir Edmund Gosse seeks to establish two facts about his parents-that they were genteel and that they were religious extremists. He makes no attempt to relate these ideas but simply places them side by side. His parents, he claims, were impoverished but proud gentlefolk, the descendants of once wealthy families. His mother's father had been an eccentric foxhunting landowner, reckless with his money and fond of his daughter, whom he had educated as a bluestocking. But she was utterly opposed in character to her hedonistic, improvident parent and, alone among her family, did not regret the loss of their estate in Wales. She had a natural taste for severe religious belief, and by what Gosse calls "curious coincidence" and "accident" she gravi- tated to the same fanatical Protestant sect as Gosse's father, a man of similar character, intellectual ability and social background.'

George Moore, who first suggested the idea of Father and Son to Gosse and who read the book in manuscript, objected to the foxhunting grandfather as irrelevant and urged Gosse to be more forthright in condemning his parents for mistreating him in the name of religion.2 The point is an interesting one: why does Gosse choose to emphasize his parents' social standing, when their religion is the real issue? The link between the two ideas is scarcely inevitable. Most people would associate such Protestant sectari- anism with less educated and less privileged people, and this common prejudice is later substantiated by Gosse's unflattering portrait of his father's followers as a set of village dolts and loonies, with the odd vulgar hypocrite by way of relief. Surely Gosse means that his parents became religious fanatics despite their upbringing. Why does he not say so? Why, having raised the issue of social class in the first place, does he offer no more credible explanation than that of temperament and chance for their adoption of such unusual religious opinions?

Gosse's silence on this point is a characteristic strategy. George

487



Moore knew Gosse well and rightly suspected him of wanting to avoid touchy issues. Gosse's intense loyalty to the niceties of late- Victorian literary manners meant that he could approach many subjects by indirection only, and the subject of his parents' sup- posed mistreatment of him was certainly one of these. Yet his re- bellion against the Puritanism of the past was central to his life, and Father and Son clearly points the way towards A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Gosse was an important transitional figure in the development of British modernism, a proponent of the work of Ibsen, Strindberg and Gide, but his protest against the values he had rejected was a persistently oblique one. His tendency to hint at his meaning, to insinuate rather than to speak out, annoyed such modernists of the next generation as Virginia Woolf, who wrote eloquently on what a fine writer Gosse would have been had he allowed himself to say what he meant.3 She implies that his failure to be forthright invalidates much of his work for modern readers. Gosse himself, when confronted by the sexual ex- plicitness of so uncompromising a work as Joyce's Ulysses, seems to have feared the same. "If Ulysses really is a work of distinction," he exclaimed, "I have lived in vain, and all that I have honoured and striven to support for 60 years is rubbish."4 His self-assessment was not far off the mark, for of his many works only Father and Son remains of interest to nonspecialist modern readers. The exception to the rule is all the more remarkable. From its first publication in 1907 Father and Son was recognized as unusual among Gosse's works and as a masterpiece of its kind. Since then it has been reis- sued more than thirty times and has acquired the status of a minor classic.5 For this single work Gosse has won a small but persistent modern audience, one that is seemingly not at all repelled by the evasiveness that so annoyed Virginia Woolf. In this essay my main concern is to account for both the extent and limits of the work's continued popularity with modern readers. By examining the rhetoric of Gosse's narration and some characteristic modern responses to it I hope to show how he transcended his ordinary limitations and created a work that satisfied both his own literary values and those of successive generations.

II

Before examining the curious way Gosse asserts his parents' social standing, I need to touch on some elementary characteristics of the book's narrative rhetoric. The first of these is the way the book

488 Sir Edmund Gosse's Father and Son



identifies itself as a specifically intellectual entertainment, a good read for the serious-minded and cultivated reader. This is mainly conveyed by its mixture of narrative incident and intellectual commentary. The title Father and Son, which might be that of a novel, suggests a domestic drama, but the subtitle A Study of Two Tem- peraments promises analytical or even scholarly conclusions, although it also faintly echoes the title Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. The preface goes on to insist that the book is the very antithesis of a trifling fictional entertainment, that it is a scru- pulously accurate historical document and a significant contribu- tion to educational and religious history and the study of the human mind (33). So relentless an assertion of the author's cultural seriousness may almost be guaranteed to separate the highminded sheep from the frivolous goats among his potential readers. But if Father and Son deliberately excludes a mass readership, it offers much to those who remain. With the fourth paragraph of chapter one Gosse suddenly forsakes his cautiously academic and self-defensive tone to reveal himself as an expert and gifted storyteller. His narrative passages are confident, witty, amusing, precise, alive with sensory detail and (as has often been noted) intensely nov- elistic. These passages are interspersed with the intellectual commentary he promised us, but his tone as commentator is much lighter than in the preface. Thus the work appeals on two levels: we are offered the pleasure of reading a dramatic and well-told story, and the further pleasure of feeling that we are adding to our stock of historical understanding as we do so. Gosse was notori- ously both a clever anecdotalist and an expert at flattering people by saying what they wanted to hear.6 Having swiftly restricted his audience to those who pride themselves on their education and are in the mood for a serious read, he persistently compliments us on our good taste in having gone on reading and plays up with great skill to our desire to be both entertained and made to feel culturally superior.

His intellectual commentary on the action is notably vague and unsystematic, and this is part of the work's appeal. For example, he says that the relationship of father and son "<was assailed by forces in comparison with which the changes that health or fortune or place introduce are as nothing" (35). He then never says what these forces are.7 That is, he imparts a strong feeling of intellectual significance to his story without being too specific as to what it exemplifies. Readers have little difficulty with this vagueness be-

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cause they are used to the literary tradition he invokes by means of his preface and introductory remarks. The basic form of the tradition is the parable or moral fable-a brief story that we are invited to read not just as story but rather as exemplifying an important principle or set of ideas. The effect of the form is to capture our attention with a dramatic tale while convincing us that we are learning something at the same time. This effect is not lessened when the conclusions to be drawn are never clearly stated, for such imprecision leaves us free (within limits) to draw the conclusions we wish.

To appeal as strongly as possible to its audience the narrative element of a parable or moral fable should offer a fresh version of a familiar and popular story. Stories of mistreated children are as old as storytelling itself and were especially a staple of Victorian fiction and autobiography. At its simplest, the Victorian version of this story centers on a helpless child who is systematically tortured by a set of adult villains until he or she is finally released into some form of material, bourgeois heaven or else subjected to a lingering and intensely satisfying death. In more complex versions the child's mind, rather than the abuse he or she suffers, becomes the focus of attention. Gosse's characterization of himself as child is clearly in the latter category, and resembles Dickens's Pip rather than Oliver Twist or Little Nell. The son as a child has a real secret life and spirit of his own. Like Pip he is warped by his upbringing: he becomes an overly serious, self-conscious, priggish boy and youth, although never an entirely unlikable one. But we also understand that the son becomes the narrator-an urbane, witty, cultivated man of the world, seemingly modern rather than Victorian in his values and interests, a man of artistic sensibility, learning and excellent taste. Like Pip he looks back at his earlier self with some tolerance and rather more disapproval, but he expresses his present pain much more than the adult Pip and shows more clearly how tender are the psychological scars he bears from his early days. Thus Gosse has invented an admirable central figure for a child-victim story-a son who as child has an individual vitality that commands our sympathy, who as youth has weaknesses that we cannot approve but can understand, and who as narrator has a distinctive personality that shows what would have been repressed or even destroyed had the father won their battle.

Much of the effect of the child-victim story depends on the au-




thor's success in characterizing the adult villains. Gosse is thus especially concerned to establish his parents as foils to himself both as child and narrator. The foxhunting grandfather contributes to this effect, for the narrator goes out of his way to associate himself with the grandfather's worldly, relaxed self-indulgence as opposed to the rigid asceticism of his mother (36-37). This process of contrasting himself as adult narrator with his parents is a major un- stated business of the opening pages. He appears as cosmopolitan and open-minded, they appear as narrow-minded and sectarian. He is sympathetic to sinners and human frailty, they are self-right- eous and intolerant. He is sometimes tentative and self-depre- cating, they never question their rightness. They seem like mon- sters of will power and dogmatic faith, while he as narrator is much closer to his implied readers in his professed values. They are fanatical, he is reasonable; they are inhuman, he is like us. Thus the narrator as child appears as a model of normality in a hostile world, as an accident of fate, as a tender flower precariously attached to the granite cliffs of his parents' religious absolutism.

At the same time the parents are presented as heroes of a kind, especially the father. The father's energy, strength, conviction, and absolute integrity give him heroic status, but his misapplication of these qualities, his unswerving pursuit of the wrong goals, makes him a terrifying, even demonic, figure. In chapter five, describing his father's chagrin at the reception of Omphalos, Gosse writes, "My Father was not prepared for such a fate. He had been the spoiled darling of the public, the constant favourite of the press, and now, like the dark angels of old, 'so huge a rout / Encumbered him with ruin" (105-6). Gosse's use of this quotation from Para- dise Lost is characteristically evasive, for the implied comparison is not with "dark angels" generally but with Satan, the classic literary example of heroic energy diverted to the service of evil. The imagery of chapter five develops this association at length. Darwin's new theory is described as a "flood of light" initiating a great conflict in which it "was becoming necessary to stand em- phatically in one army or the other." The father, a man of wrath who has made a wrathful God in his own image, becomes an ad- versary of light and enters into ""the servitude of error"8 In so doing he closes "the doors upon himself forever" and is cast into a darkening hellworld of his own making. "'Deeply enwoven in the chain of his own thoughts," he endlessly paces the limits of this

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gloomy prison, and his child companion is pained on their walks together "to look up into the firmament and converse with a dark face against the sky" (102-10). Such imagery has much to do with many readers' response to the father as a kind of perverse hero, a horrific and fascinating figure enslaved by his own ego and bending all his considerable power to enslave others. We read on to see how this colossus of will power is to be defeated, as we as- sume he must have been by the son's survival to become the narrator.9 But the son's victory seems a pale and unconvincing thing in comparison, as many critics have noted. Gosse's preface invites us to see the story as essentially tragic (34), and he makes every effort to impart the dimensions of a tragic hero to the father by drama- tizing the good and even noble qualities that the father has sacri- ficed to dogmatic faith. The father's supposedly genteel status is of course one such quality, in Gosse's view.

We can see at least three literary traditions on which Gosse draws in order to appeal to his implied readers. Through his intellectual commentary he offers the possibility of enlightenment and historical understanding, and from this point of view the work appears as a drama of ideas, a variation on the traditional nineteenth- century tale of spiritual discovery.'0 The narrative structure on which he comments also owes much to the closely related tale of the mistreated child, and this contributes greatly to the emotional force of the work. But our attention is diverted from this essentially melodramatic and sentimental plot material by his subtle characterization of the parents, especially by his treatment of the father as a tragic rather than merely villainous figure. Thus Gosse seems to have found something like a parable or moral fable, something like a novel and something like a tragedy in the events of his family's history.

Whenever these events (as known to Gosse) did not suit these literary patterns, he reinterpreted or changed them to fit. For example, consider his account of his mother's heroic self-sacrifice on behalf of her two brothers' careers:

When the catastrophe of my grandfather's fortune had occurred, they had not yet left school. My Mother, in spite of an extreme dislike of teaching which was native to her, immediately ac- cepted the situation of a governess in the family of an Irish nobleman. The mansion was only to be approached, as Miss Edge- worth would have said, "through eighteen sloughs, at the immi- nent peril of one's life", and when one had reached it, the




mixture of opulence and squalor, of civility and savagery, was unspeakable. But my Mother was well paid, and she stayed in this distasteful environment, doing the work she hated most, while with the margin of her salary she helped first one of her brothers and then the other through his Cambridge course. They studied hard and did well at the university. At length their sister received, in her "ultima Thule", news that her younger brother had taken his degree, and then and there, with a sigh of intense relief, she resigned her situation and came straight back to En- gland.

(45-46)

It happens that some historical records remain of this period in Emily Bowes's life, and they reveal that much, of this passage is fiction. He implies that his mother was a young woman when his grandfather's money was lost. In fact she was eight years old. He has told us earlier that she did not regret the loss. She herself left an eloquent account of the shattering effect on her of this descent into poverty. As for her brothers not having left school, they seem unlikely to have begun it, since one was under two years old and the other under seven. Emily Bowes became a governess nine years later, not immediately, and for a clergyman in Berkshire, not a nobleman in Ireland. She spent fourteen years in Berkshire and then took a second job with the family of Sir Charles Musgrave in no less savage a place than Brighton. Her younger brother Arthur never attended Cambridge. Her older brother Edmund did, and it is true that she helped him financially and that her resignation from her second position as governess occurred about the same time as his graduation in 1841.1

At one time or another Edmund Gosse knew all this, for on his father's death he undertook a biography-published in 1890 as The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S.-and in the course of writing it he extensively researched his parents' early lives. Whether he refused to let mere factual evidence sully the myths he had built up about them or whether he had forgotten what he had read in the long interval between writing this biography and writing Father and Son, I cannot say. The nervous asseverations of punctilious accuracy in his preface are genuine, to a point. He had checked the facts to the best of his ability, and when he was made aware of certain minor errors in the first edition he carefully cor- rected them.'2 But (as Churton Collins had cruelly and insistently pointed out) Sir Edmund's head for accuracy was constitutionally weak. The problem was not simply inattention to factual detail.

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Gosse's use of language was habitually influenced more by his sense of audience than his sense of truth. His upbringing had left him much in need of affection, and he strove constantly to impress, to charm. In his correspondence he characteristically used the language of agnosticism to agnostics but did not hesitate to use the language of orthodox faith when writing to a Christian.'3 George Moore had a sharp eye for these equivocations of Gosse's. The conclusion of Father and Son, which is marked by a return to the defensive language of the opening pages, did not satisfy him, and he told Gosse so. "What I cannot abide is a shuffle in the closing chapters, and, my dear Gosse, you have shuffled," Moore wrote.14 Towards the end of his life Gosse admitted as much to Harold Ni- colson. The ending of Father and Son, he said, had been "slightly 'arranged,'" for there was no sharp break from the father's au- thority, as it implies. He then entertained Nicolson with a vivid and horrifying anecdote about his father's last hours, one that con- tained a characteristic inaccuracy, for he made his anecdote just a trifle more dramatic by extending the deathbed scene some two hours.15 And Gosse did not tell Nicholson that the ending of Father and Son had been "arranged" in part by his deliberately mis- quoting the key letter from the father that he gives in his final pages, so as to pretend that such confrontation as did occur had been face to face and not by letter.16

In thus documenting the fictional element in Father and Son I do not mean to criticize either the work or Gosse himself, at least not as an autobiographer. Current critical theory rightly holds that autobiography is inescapably fictional. The old joke about memoir- writing has it that Heaven lies about us in our infancy, and we lie about ourselves in our old age. In fact we could be said to lie about ourselves from first to last. Not only our powers of observation but our memories are selective, and we typically keep only those records that support our ideas of ourselves. These ideas are themselves shaped by our environment, which provides both the value systems by which we judge our behavior and the language in which we explain it. In writing an autobiography this tendency is much accentuated, for the form demands that we create a literary image of ourselves through the medium of the kinds of discourse we share with our potential readers. "Where does the language of self-writing come from?" Avrom Fleishman has asked. "From the community's narrative discourse, to be sure, especially from those authoritative texts which embody the prevailing schemas of a




life.... Life stories, like lives, are modelled after idols of the tribe and constitute a subgroup sometimes difficult to distinguish from its other narratives of history and fiction."17 Much of Gosse's appeal derives from his fictionalizing, from the way he interprets his life in terms of variations on a number of traditional literary themes. In the passage quoted above, for example, he has turned his mother into someone like the protagonists of Charlotte Brontes novels, or like Bront6 herself as depicted in Mrs. Gaskell's Life. Yet this pleasantly familiar figure is seen in a distinctive light: such models of puritan energy retain something of their heroic quality, but we are invited to feel that they are somehow the heroes of another way of life from our own, that they are not our heroes.

It may be objected that the impetus to write fiction is basically at odds with the impetus to create an accurate historical record, but this is true only when the contradiction is acknowledged by writer or reader. Gosse's preface shows his uneasy awareness that Father and Son might be read as a novel, but he does not appear to have been much impeded by such self-doubt while writing it. His more observant readers may note some signs of his fictionalizing (for example, his several claims to know his parents' unspoken thoughts), but one must emulate Churton Collins and delve into his sources in order to appreciate the real extent of Gosse's deviousness. For most modern readers, Father and Son feels like a historical document but reads like a novel, and the improbability of this combina- tion is not likely to occur to them.

III

To return to the puzzle with which I began this essay: Gosse not only starts off with the issue of his parents' social status but works away at this idea for the rest of the book. According to him they were above all cultivated, distinguished for their intellectual ac- complishments, "people of light and leading" (43). He, a "proud and sensitive" child (65), was revolted by the smell, appearance and behavior characteristic of the social world into which he was thrown by his father's eccentric beliefs. The father's followers are insistently characterized as "nothing more than peasants of a some- what primitive type" (163). When a servant predicts in her vulgar way that the boy will become a missionary, he vows never to preach to "horrid, tropical niggers" (128). That is, he will never lower himself as his father has done. Though courted by the famous author Charles Kingsley, the father inexplicably prefers the

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company of his ill-educated and humble followers (139). He is blind to the social degradation he is visiting upon his son, and the laughably unladylike governess Miss Marks does not help. Fortu- nately, the father remarries: his second wife is an eminently re- fined person who understands the boy's plight and helps to extri- cate him from it. Nonetheless, whatever the absurdity of his behavior, the father is a "lofty-minded ... gentleman" (238).

Once again the historical evidence does not fully support this thesis. Gosse has implied that his parents were of similar social background, but Philip Gosse's father was an itinerant and half- crazed painter of miniatures whom his son scarcely knew. Philip Gosse was raised by his mother, who had no formal education and had been a domestic servant before her marriage. He was very humbly brought up and through his own remarkable talents strug- gled upwards to become first a clerk, then a Canadian home- steader, a schoolteacher and a hack author before finally winning some fame as a naturalist and popularizer of science, an occupation he forsook as soon as he had made enough money by it.18 He showed few signs of intellectual distinction outside the field of natural history and (in my opinion) none at all as a religious thinker. Douglas Wertheimer suggests that Philip Gosse was never comfortable with the intellectual company he won by his success as a popular author and that he identified much more with the village people who attended his chapel.'9 Though it was inexplicable to his son that he would keep the author of Hypatia waiting in the garden while he held a Bible lesson for ignorant peasants, it may have made good sense to Philip Gosse himself.

That his father was perhaps less than a shining model of genteel behavior is, I suggest, just what Sir Edmund Gosse was afraid might be true and would not in any circumstances admit. Hence his efforts to make his parents conform to the type of the educated eccentric as opposed to that of the vulgar fanatic. And of course this approach justifies the son's actions: his preoccupation with high culture and the refinements of genteel life is simply a matter of his coming into his inheritance, of reclaiming what was due him in the first place.

Why does such intense Victorian class consciousness not make the narrator seem culturally remote to modern readers? The book's insistent social theme has been very rarely noticed by its critics, and the narrator is not usually seen as a snob (despite Gosse's well-deserved reputation for snobbishness). Perhaps it is partly be-




cause the theme of social degradation is so integral to the child- victim story as to be scarcely noticeable without a special effort. Oliver Twist, Little Nell, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield are all genteel children cast out of the secure homes that are naturally due to them. But the question still arises how we can identify with a narrator who feels such contempt for village (not to mention black) people. Modern readers are unlikely to see the narrator in such negative terms because they are easily able to rewrite the text, to change Gosse's expressed meaning to something more comfortable and closer to home. Specifically, I think they transmute Gosse's social snobbishness into their own intellectual snobbishness. Re- member that the text is addressed to cultivated readers and persistently commends them on their cultivation and good taste. Gosse's persona as narrator is insidiously and overwhelmingly genteel, the very antithesis of anything loud, coarse, harsh, provincial or ill-in- formed.20 In the company of so charmingly civilized a person as Sir Edmund how can the reader not feel intellectually privileged, above the common herd? And have we not all been sensitive and misunderstood souls, ill-treated by a vulgar world? Thus Father and Son works by leaving lots of space for us to read ourselves into the narrative, to identify in a complex way with its several main characters and to join sympathetically in the conflict it sets out.21

IV

If Gosse presents his father as a sinner against light, a rebel against the true God and a worshipper of a false one, what religion does the son offer in place of the father's, and how might this appeal to modern readers?

Gosse himself wants us to think of the father as representing a dying Puritanism, the last outcrop of seventeenth-century religious dogmatism. He is vaguer about his own beliefs but seems sympathetic to liberal notions of science, religion and culture. This conflict between an old-fashioned and a more modern sensibility is obviously one that many modern readers will understand and like, but (not surprisingly) a few have questioned the son's values or even attacked him as offering nothing in place of the faith his father held.22

If we turn for a moment to the biography of his father that Gosse published in 1890 and that led George Moore to suggest the idea of Father and Son, we can see his beliefs more clearly. This book suggests that Philip Gosse's father had never been an oppressive

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influence on him, that as a youth Philip had great freedom to be himself, that he was then fully in sympathy with the literary and cultural movements of his time, that his choice of profession and religious opinion was entirely his own. Philip Gosse is presented as above all a unique, intensely independent and powerful individual. In a key passage Edmund presents his father and Charles Darwin as types of those who express their individuality in the unswerving singleminded pursuit of great public goals. In contrast he presents himself and A. H. Clough as types of those who express their individuality in being irresolute, sensitive, introspective, pri- vate, literary.23 This suggests that Edmund's creed, so far as he had one, was one of individualism. He admired his father as a great individualist; he resented him because his form of individualism denied others the right to theirs. Philip Gosse sinned against the age by refusing to tolerate the literary and scientific movements that succeeded those of his youth. He sinned against his son by refusing to let him become the pleasure-loving aesthete he wanted to be.

In Father and Son this idea is conveyed chiefly by Gosse's em- phasis on the idea of the will. Terms such as "will," "wilfully" and the like are used repeatedly, most notably in the image of the boy as a bird fluttering in the network of the father's will (232), and the parents' forceful and intrusively energetic personalities are suggested in many other ways. The father's followers are weak-willed or have submitted their wills to him. The son's discovery of his own will power and his preservation of this "hard nut of individuality" (168) are the first steps towards a victory that consists not of overcoming the father but simply of escaping his influence, of winning the right to be himselfA24

Several theorists of autobiography (notably Karl Weintraub) have argued that the idea of individuality is specifically modern.25 Ear- lier models of behavior had offered the ideal of conformity to a type and had devalued idiosyncratic differences. Hence autobiography since 1800 has taken on a new importance and has a different quality from most earlier writing about the self. Avrom Fleishman discounts this thesis and contends that the ideal of individuality is simply "another normative ideal" like those before it.26 He has a point, but it is a fact that many people in modern Western civiliza- tion do stress this particular normative ideal, in part by wanting to believe that in less privileged times individuality was not permitted in the way we permit it. By appealing to the ideal of indi-




vidual cultivation as opposed to dogmatic collective belief Gosse presents himself as a representative of a new age and makes it easy for his readers to read themselves into his text. If they were not in a mood to value individual cultivation they would not be reading Father and Son in the first place, since it is specifically addressed to people in such a mood. In effect, Father and Son congratulates us on being ourselves, on being modern rather than old-fashioned, on being cultivated rather than vulgar, on being free spirits of the twentieth century rather than half-mad religious dogmatists of the nineteenth. Above all it congratulates us for going on reading. It suggests as strongly as it can that reading a book like Father and Son is the way, the truth and the light, if only for the duration of the read. Philip Gosse wanted others to submit to his absolute control; his more artful son has found a way of holding us, for the time being, in the spell of his storytelling. To return to the parallel Gosse draws between Satan and his father as someone who had been cast down from his place as the public's favorite, does this not also suggest a covert parallel between the reading public and God? I think that for Edmund Gosse the educated reading public was very like a god, a god that he endlessly and anxiously propitiated. As he said himself in old age, literature was all that had really mat- tered to him.27 No wonder we accept him, when he admires us so much.

v The issue of speaking out seems to have been fundamental to

Gosse's life. Philip Gosse endlessly urged him to speak out for what he believed in, to press the claims of his extreme Protestant faith on everyone he met. Edmund initially shared his father's faith but shrank from the social duty of testifying to it. Repelled by his father's attempt to make him a replica of himself, he adopted a rela- tivistic faith in individualism that in his own case served to justify a life dedicated to aestheticism. Still he did not speak out: to praise aesthetic fulfillment as Gosse quite consistently did is not to reveal openly how thoroughly he had rejected his father's views and much of what was officially or publicly valued in Victorian Britain. Indeed Gosse went out of his way to hide his real beliefs, and he seems to have felt that others should do the same. He criticizes his father as being like Gregers Werle in Ibsen's The Wild Duck, "with his determination to pull the veil of illusion away from every com- promise that makes life bearable" (246).

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As one of his critics has said, he asserts his right as a gentleman to privacy.28 Much of his reticence and indirection stems from his fear of appearing less than genteel. He will not say that his parents were religious extremists despite their social standing, for to do so would make him appear to be snobbish, and one should never appear to be snobbish. How much easier merely to mention their family backgrounds and then pass swiftly to their religious beliefs. If the reader makes the connection and realizes how absurd such beliefs are to someone so cultivated as Sir Edmund, that is the reader's doing, not the author's. And if the reader is led to feel that religious beliefs are, after all, just a matter of temperament and chance, Sir Edmund cannot be accused of saying anything so shocking to traditional ideas of morality. So it goes throughout the book. Even the professed plain speaking of the conclusion, the specific protest against his father's way of thought, is carefully couched as a protest against the easy target of "evangelical religion, or any religion in a violent form." Yet Gosse's criticisms might apply to all religious ideas (violent or otherwise) of a future life, which he dismisses as "a palace which no one has explored and of the plan of which we know absolutely nothing" (248). "In my hot and silly brain," he had earlier written of himself as an adolescent, "Jesus and Pan held sway together, as in a wayside chapel discordantly and impishly consecrated to Pagan and to Christian rites" (233-34). Virginia Woolf blames Gosse for never revealing the depth of his attachment to the values of Pan, but it has also been argued that he was never sure himself where his final loyalties lay and indeed did not want to know.29 His early life had perhaps given him enough of systematic belief for a lifetime, and who can blame him? In any case, he is systematic only about being indeterminate, with the result that modern readers find plenty of space in the text to substitute their own form of individualism for Gosse's and to fancy that they agree with him.

Whether, as Woolf argues, Gosse would have been a greater writer and a more influential man "if only his pagan and sensual joy had not been dashed by perpetual caution," if only he had not been "always a little afraid of being found out," no one will ever be able to say.30 The criticism probably tells us more about Woolf than about Gosse, about her generation's struggle with the question of frankness. She speaks as if Gosse's problem was merely the time in which he lived, as if writers of her own time were free to protest openly, but surely the problem continued for her and for modernist




writers in general. Writers are normally tied in some manner to established society, by reason of their education and by their need for publication and for an audience, not to mention their families and friends. Literary protest against the past is never a simple matter of self-expression. The rhetoric of protest will always be controlled by the writer's sense of occasion and audience, and that will include an awareness of forbidden and permitted topics, of forbidden and permitted language, of strategies to cope with con- ventional defenses, and the like. Even protest has its decorum, nor was Virginia Woolf without hers.

Several recent critical accounts of Father and Son have stressed the disparity between the attitudes professed by the narrator and those unconsciously or indirectly revealed.3' Gosse as narrator wishes to appear to have transcended his father's world and all the suffering it caused him, but this is merely an urbane mask for his real feelings. Virginia Woolf was one reader who could see behind the mask: Gosse claimed to be the child of cultivated parents, but what Woolf understood was "the narrowness, the ugliness of his upbringing ... the absence from his home of culture, beauty, ur- banity, graciousness."32 That is, she understood more than Gosse himself would ever have admitted, perhaps even to himself. And yet she blames him, calls him an inferior writer, for hinting rather than speaking out. Recent developments in critical theory deal more satisfactorily with the necessary complexity of autobiograph- ical writing. "Normal self-reference," says one critic, "is marked by anxiety, alienation, and incompletion." "The impulse to reveal," says another, "is accompanied by an equal and opposite impulse to conceal."33 Gosse may be seen as a striking case of what happens to all writers when they seek to testify to their beliefs. Father and Son survives as a minor classic of our time because Gosse found a way of speaking indirectly through the restrictions of the current literary code, and he was certainly not the last proponent of modernism to have done so. Innis College, University of Toronto

NOTES

1 Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, ed. Peter Abbs (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 35-37. Further references are to this edition and are cited in the text.

2 E. E. Charteris, The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse (London: Heine- mann, 1931), 308-10; Charles Burkhart, "George Moore and Father and Son," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 15 (1960): 75.

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3Virginia Woolf, "Edmund Gosse," Fortnightly Review n.s. 129 (1931): 766-73. 4 Cited in Ann Thwaite's admirable biography, Edmund Gosse: A Literary Land-

scape 1849-1928 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1984), 453. 5 See James Hepburn's introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of Fa-

ther and Son (London, 1974), xxiii. 6 ""There are countless examples of how he would say and do almost anything to

bind to him the people he valued" (Thwaite, 350). 7 This point is well treated by William J. Gracie, "Truth of Form in Edmund

Gosse's Father and Son," Journal of Narrative Technique 4 (1974): 178. 8 James D. Woolf, "Tragedy in Gosse's Father and Son," English Literature in

Transition 9 (1966): 138; see the article as a whole for a treatment of the father as tragic hero.

9 See E. Pearlman, "Father and Mother in Father and Son," Victorian Newsletter 55 (Spring 1979): 20.

10 See Avrom Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self- Writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley and London: Univ. of Cali- fornia Press, 1983), 300-309; and Linda H. Peterson, Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 171, 173-82.

11 See Thwaite, 13-14; Douglas Wertheimer, "Philip Henry Gosse: Science and Revelation in the Crucible" (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1977), 166-68; and Alumni Cantabrigiensis, s.v. Bowes.

12 Douglas Wertheimer, "Gosse's Corrections to Father and Son, 1907-1928," Notes and Queries 223 (1978): 327-32.

13 See Thwaite, 348-50. 14 Burkhart (note 2), 76. 15James Lees-Milne, Harold Nicolson: A Biography 1886-1929 (London: Chatto

and Windus, 1980), 317. The story is cited and the inaccuracy pointed out by Thwaite, 315-16, 539-40.

16Wertheimer, "Philip Henry Gosse," 429, 475. 17 Fleishman (note 10), 479. 18 For Philip Gosse, see (in addition to his son's biography) Charteris (note 2),

Thwaite, and Wertheimer, "Philip Henry Gosse." 19 Wertheimer, "Philip Henry Gosse," 486. 20 For an excellent analysis of the means by which Gosse establishes a contrast

between the narrowness of provincial Dissent and the supposedly higher values of his own educated sensibility, see Philip Dodd, "The Nature of Edmund Gosse's Father and Son," English Literature in Transition 22 (1979): 270-80. The point is also especially well treated by David Grylls, Guardians and Angels: Parents and Children in Nineteenth-Century Literature (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1978), 175-77.

21 On the complexity demanded in readers' responses to the main characters, see William R. Siebenschuh, Fictional Techniques and Factual Works (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1983), 49-50.

22 See for example Jerome H. Buckley, The Turning Key: Autobiography and the Subjective Impulse Since 1800 (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), 107-8.

23 Edmund Gosse, The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F. R. S. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1890), 149-50.

24 The theme of individuation has been noted by several critics but especially by Abbs in his excellent introduction to the Penguin edition, 29-31.

25 Karl Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobi- ography (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978). See also John N. Morris, Versions of the Self: Studies in English Autobiography from John Bunyan to John Stuart Mill (New York and London: Basic Books, 1966), and Georges Gus-




dorf, "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," in Autobiography: Essays Theoret- ical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980).

26 Fleishman, 47n. 27 Thwaite, 493. 28 Howard Helsinger, "Credence and Credibility: The Concern for Honesty in

Victorian Autobiography," in Approaches to Victorian Autobiography, ed. George P. Landow (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1979), 60-61.

29Woolf (note 3), 769; William Irvine, in his introduction to the Houghton Mifflin edition of Father and Son (Boston, 1965), xli.

30 Woolf, 769-70. 31 See in particular the critiques by Abbs and Grylls cited above (notes 24 and 20).

And see Ira Bruce Nadel, "Apologize or Confess!: The Dilemma of Victorian Auto- biography," biography 5 (1982): 198-99.

32 Woolf, 767. 33 Fleishman, 29; Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art

of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), 35. Eakin here refers to a specific autobiography, but the comment applies well to the form as a whole.

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Documents

Sir Edmund Gosse and his Modern Readers: The Continued Appeal of Father and Son