Edmund Gosse

Camille by Alexandre Dumas Fils.

Translated by Edmund Gosse.

Chapter one.

In my opinion, it is impossible to create characters until one has spent a long time in studying men, as it is impossible to speak a language until it has been seriously acquired.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Rachel Lintern.

Camille by Alexandre Dumas Fils.

Translated by Edmund Gosse.

Chapter Four.

Poems by George Santayana.

A Spaniard in England by Edmund Gosse.

Reprinted by kind permission of the author and of the proprietors of the Sunday Times.

Only in solitude can soliloquies be appreciated, and Mr. Santayana is not an author for loud streets or for them who tear around the country in blatant char-à-banc.

It was entitled, Literature at Our Universities, and attacked, from Shakespeare to Pope.

An Inquiry into the Causes and Phenomena of the Rise of Classical Poetry in England by Edmund Gosse, Clark Lecturer on English Literature at the University of Cambridge.

Mr. Gosse replied in the Athenaeum, October 30th, pages 534 to 535, and the Quarterly Reviewer in the following issue, pages 570 to 571. mr swinburne and the quarterly review to the editor of the pall mall gazette sir will you allow me to make one or two observations on the few statements of fact which it is here and there possible to discern through the storm of expletives and superlatives that bursts from mr swinburne's pen in to-night's athenaeum The object of his letter is to discredit the quarterly reviewer whose article on English literature has attracted so much attention.

This is how he does it.

It was both strange and sweet to see poor Turgenev, acting charades of the most extravagant description, dressed out in old shawls and masks, going on all fours, etc.

The charades are their usual Sunday evening occupation, and the good faith with which Turgenev, at his age and with his glories, can go into them is a striking example of the truth of that spontaneity which europeans have and we have not fancy longfellow lowell or charles norton doing the like and every sunday evening whether or not all celebrated americans behave within variable decorum the astonished spectator of turgenia's performance had no temptation to do the like his appearance among a company of artists and writers gathered together in a country village during the late summer of eighteen eighty six has been characteristically recorded by mr edmund gosse henry james was the only sedate one of us all benign indulgent but grave and not often unbending beyond a genial chuckle it is remembered with what affability he wore a garland of flowers at a birthday feast and even nobly descending took part one night in a cake walk but mostly though not much our senior he was serious mildly avuncular but very happy and unupbraiding by that time henry james was at his ease in england the inhabitants were no longer either gods or imbeciles through the general british fog he had perceived gleams of intelligence shining on his bewilderment he was no longer wholly dependent on boston for refreshment he could fall back upon the company of mr edmund gosse and he had found a friend n r l stevenson the little handful of islanders possessed of a genuine interest in the art of letters and the criticism of life emerged from the obscurity and he made out that on the whole there were perhaps about as many civilized people in england as in his native land yet he was a little troubled about his position he wondered while he reviewed the past whether the path he had so carefully chosen for himself was the right one whether he might not have missed more by leaving the united states than he had gained by coming to england he lamented in a letter written to his brother william in eighteen ninety nine that he had not had the kind of early experience that might have attached him to his own country he earnestly advised a different treatment for his nephews what i most of all feel and in the light of it conjure you to keep doing for them is there being a mem to contract local saturations and attachments in respect to their own great and glorious country to learn and strike roots into its infinite beauty as i suppose and variety its being their own will double their use of it it was only after a visit to america in nineteen o four that he found on his return to rye that he had a home and a country he was able after this discovery to write to mrs wharton that your only drawback is not having the homeliness and the inevitability and the happy limitation and the affluent poverty of a country of your own comme moi par exemple and he could declare after taking the oath of allegiance to the king of england in that i was really too associated before for any nominal change to matter the process has only shown me what i virtually was so that it's rather disappointing in respect to acute sensation i haven't any associated he certainly was allied by innumerable sympathies and affections to the adopted country but he was never really english or american or even cosmopolitan and it is too difficult to suppose that even if he had passed all his youth in new england and contracted all the local saturations and attachments he urged for his nephews he could ever have melted comfortably into american uniformity he who took nothing in the world for granted could surely never have taken new england for granted today with the complete record before us the novels criticisms biographies plays and letters we can understand how little those international relations that engaged henry james's attention mattered to his genius wherever he might have lived and whatever human interactions he might have observed he would in all probability have reached much the same conclusion that he arrived at by the way of america france and england when he walked out of the refuge of his study into the world and looked about him he saw a place of torment where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of the doomed defenseless children of light he had the abiding comfort of an inner certainty and perhaps he did bring that from new england that the children of light had an eternal advantage he was aware to the finest fibre of his being that the poor sensitive gentleman he so numerously treated possessed a treasure that would outlast all the glittering paste of the world and the flesh he knew that nothing in life mattered compared with spiritual decency we may conclude that the nationalities of his betrayed and triumphant victims are not an important factor they may equally well be innocent americans maltreated by odious europeans refined europeans fleeced by unscrupulous americans or young children of any race exposed to evil influences the essential fact is that wherever he looked henry james saw fineness apparently sacrificed to grossness beauty to avarice truth to a bold front he realized how constantly the tenderness of growing life is at the mercy of personal tyranny and he hated the tyranny of persons over each other his novels are a repeated exposure of this wickedness a reiterated and passionate plea for the fullest freedom of development unimperiled by reckless and barbarous stupidity he was himself most scrupulously careful not to exercise any tyrannical power over other people the only advice he ever permitted himself to offer to a friend was a recommendation to let your soul live towards the end of his days his horror of interfering or seeming to interfere with the freedom of others became so overpowering that it was a misery for him to suspect that the plans of his friends might be made with reference to himself much as he enjoyed seeing them he so disliked to think that they were undergoing the discomfort of voyages and railway journeys in order to be near him that he would gladly have prevented their start if he could his utopia was an anarchy where nobody would be responsible for any other human being but only for his own civilized character his circle of friends will easily recall how finely henry james had fitted himself to be a citizen of this commonwealth

apropos luxembourg and william the third although the latter should be included among the statesmen i will quote a passage from macaulay in such an age sixteen ninety four bodily vigour is the most indispensable qualification for a warrior at the battle of london two poor sickly beings who in a rude state of society would have been considered too puny to bear part in combats were the souls of two great armies and further on it is probable that the two fibulest in body among the hundred and twenty thousand soldiers that fought at near winden were the hunchbacked dwarf luxemburg who urged forward the fiery onset of france and the asthmatic skeleton william the third who covered the slow retreat of england napoleon was an epileptic and lord nelson at the height of his efficiency had lost an arm and an eye and what is even more remarkable was so it is said sick every time he went to sea or whenever the weather was exceptionally rough general wolfe although only thirty-two years old was already a man of shattered health when he undertook his famous expedition against quebec in spite of disheartening failures and the torture of an internal malady he finally won the decisive victory which wrested quebec from the french during the battle he was twice wounded but refused to leave the field until a third bullet pierced his lung he survived only long enough to give a final order for cutting off the retreat and breathed his last murmuring now god be praised i will die in peace let us consider for a moment what made these men pre-eminent it was not courage caesar and napoleon were no braver than thousands of their followers nor was it the capacity for endurance what then was the secret of their power i answered unhesitatingly imagination no leader has been without it and the greatest leaders are the men who have had it to a superlative degree napoleon recognized its mysterious sway for it was he who said imagination rules the world now imagination is the very quality we find most frequently allied to ill health i beg to call your attention that with the exception of legrand cond and possibly napoleon not one of these men would have passed his medical It is certainly curious that the profession of arms, the most physically exacting of all professions, is the only one whose greatest examples have without exception been tainted with disease.

CHAPTER III OF ILL HEALTH IN ITS RELATION TO GENIUS the physical conditions which accompany and affect what we call genius are obscure and have hitherto attracted little but empirical notice it is impossible not to see that absolutely normal man or woman as we describe normality is very rarely indeed an inventor or a seer or even a person of remarkable mental energy the bulk of what are called entirely healthy people add nothing to the sum of human achievement and it is not the average navvy who makes a darwin nor a typical daughter of the plough who develops into an elizabeth barrett browning the more closely we study with extremely slender resources of evidence the lives of great men of imagination and action since the beginning of the world the more clearly we ought to recognize that a reduction of all types to one stolid uniformity of what is called health would have the effect of depriving humanity of precisely those individuals who have added most to the beauty and variety of human existence when the physical conditions of men of the highest celebrity in the past are touched upon it is usual to pass them over with indifference or else to account for them as the result of disease the peculiarities of pascal or of pope or of michael angelo are either denied or it is presumed that they were the result of purely morbid factors against which their genius their rectitude or their common sense more or less successfully contended it is admitted that tassel has a hypersensitive constitution which cruelty tortured into melancholia but it is taken for granted that he would have been a greater poet if he had taken plenty of outdoor exercise these are the conclusions of mr edmund gosse and they are even more radical than mine it is however true that in sickness the perceptions physical mental and spiritual become supernormally acute and this extreme sensitiveness to impression is one of the attributes of genius.

It follows, therefore, that imagination is simulated by suffering, but not that suffering creates genius or is even inseparably allied to it.

The most universal concomitant of genius is the power of concentration, and there is nothing that so fosters that quality as ill health.

He was exceedingly delicate, and, at his best, only able to work three hours a day.

Descartes, the foremost French philosopher, had a feeble and somewhat abnormal body.

Quote, yet he considered it, I am quoting Mr. Edmund Gosse, well suited to his own purposes, and was convinced that the Cartesian philosophy would not have been improved, though the philosopher's digestion might, by developing the thews of a plowboy, end quote.

Nicolas Malbranche, the great French Cartesian philosopher, was the tenth child of his parents.

Exposition by Anonymous First

Modern Novel, A.D. 1740 by Edmund Gosse from The Great Events of Famous Historians, Volume 13, from 1905 Let me make the ballads of a nation, said Fletcher of Salton, and I care not who makes the laws." The place which the ancient ballads held in forming the characters of the people is in our day more than filled by the novels.

Everybody reads them, especially in the younger generation, and every character is more or less moulded by the sentiments and teachings they contain.

The novel has been almost entirely a modern English development.

End of First

Modern Novel, A.D. 1740.

By Edmund Gosse.

Modern

Author's note.

Early in the year 1914, Mr. Edmund Gosse told me he was asking certain of his friends to write for him a few words apiece in description of Swinburne as they had known or seen him at one time or another, and he was so good as to wish to include in this gathering a few words by myself.

I found it hard to be brief without seeming irreverent.

I failed in the attempt to make of my subject a snapshot that was not a grotesque.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen.

Translated by Edmund Gosse and William Archer.

Introduction.

From Munich on June 29, 1890, Ibsen wrote to the Swedish poet Count Karl Swenski, "Our intention has all along been to spend the summer in the Tyrol again, but circumstances are against our doing so.

No, for heaven's sake, Hedda, darling, don't touch those dangerous things.

For my sake, Hedda, eh? End of act one.

Act second of Hedda Gabler, by Henrik Ibsen, translated by Edmund Gosse and William Archer.

This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.