Gossamer Wings

by Theodore Dalrymple (August 2013)

There are moods and times of day when one wants to read something intelligent but undemanding, and for this purpose there is nothing better than the literary essays and biographies of Sir Edmund Gosse. Once regarded as a colossus of literature, or at least of literary criticism and scholarship, he is now almost forgotten except for his memoir of his relationship with his father, Father and Son, which is indeed one of the most touching evocations of a highly unusual childhood known to me.

Be this as it may, when Gosse turns from spurious biographical detail to literary criticism, he begins, somewhat ironically in the circumstances, by saying:

Sincerity, indeed, is the first gift in literature, and perhaps the most uncommon.

By one of those strange associations of ideas that to me is delightful (I cannot speak for other people) I was taken back more than quarter of a century to a conversation I had in Guatemala, around which I was driving at the time in a white pick-up truck. I gave a lift to an American hitch-hiker who told me that he had just been visiting an artist friend of his in Guatemala whose work, he said, was great because it was so sincere.

If the sincerity of others and even of ourselves in the ordinary business of life is not easy to assess or to prove, then, a fortiori, it is even more difficult to assess the sincerity of art. And yet we do so regularly, relying largely on our instinct to do so. Who, for example, could believe that Jeff Koons is sincere in anything except a desire for fame and fortune? We should suspect those themselves of insincerity who claimed to believe him to be sincere. (The very verbiage of so much art criticism causes us to suspect that it is writing by frauds of frauds for frauds.)

In his essay Gosse makes the point clearly that while sincerity is the first quality in literature, it is certainly not the last:

It is not granted to more than a few to express in precise and direct language their most powerful emotional experiences.

He continues:

The attempt to render passion by artistic speech is commonly void of success to a pathetic degree. Those who have desired, enjoyed, and suffered to the very edge of human capacity, put the musical instrument to their lips to try and tell us what they felt, and the result is all discord and falsetto.

There is no question that many of the coldest and most affected verses, such as we are apt to scorn for their tasteless weakness, must hide underneath the white ash of their linguistic poverty a core of red hot passion.

This is so not only in poetry, but in all fields of artistic and even of intellectual endeavour, particularly of a philosophical nature. Many of us must have been blinded by what we considered or hoped was an original insight, only to discover later that someone had thought precisely the same in 395 BC or AD 17. Our belief in our own originality, then, which was sincere at the time, turns out to have been a manifestation of our ignorance of all that has been said and thought before us, and the cause of initial exhilaration more properly a cause of lamentation and regret.

sonnets, one of the acknowledged glories of our literature, is built patiently and unquestionable on the union in stainless harmony of two of the most distinguished spirits which our century has produced.

In the subsequent essay in Critical Kit-Kats Gosse praises Keats in a similarly sincere way. The essay is actually a speech he made in 1894 at the dedication of a monument to Keats donated by American admirers of the poet.

odes the most masterful capacity for poetic expression which the world has ever seen?

earlier masters, it is mainly because his temperament was one which imperatively led him to select the best of all possible forms of expression.

Compared with learning from the past, from taking what was best in it and using it to the greatest advantage to create the new, originality is a cheap and pointless goal:

To comment on this essay, please click here.

here.

If you have enjoyed this article and want to read more by Theodore Dalrymple, please click here.

Theodore Dalrymple is also a regular contributor to our blog, The Iconoclast. To see all his entries, please click here.