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QUESTIONS AT ISSUE
Questions at Issue
BY
EDMUND GOSSE
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1893
[All rights reserved]
TO
JOSEPH HENRY SHORTHOUSE
This Volume is Dedicated
BY
HIS AFFECTIONATE FRIEND
THE AUTHOR
Preface
To the essays which are here collected I have given a name which atonce, I hope, describes them accurately and distinguishes them fromcriticism of a more positive order. When a writer speaks to us of theworks of the dead masters, of the literary life of the past, we demandfrom him the authoritative attitude. That Homer is a great poet, andthat the verse of Milton is exquisite, are not Questions at Issue. Indealing with such subjects the critic must persuade himself that heis capable of forming an opinion, and must then give us his opiniondefinitely. But in the continent of literary criticism, where all elseis imperial, there is a province which is still republican, and that isthe analysis of contemporary literature, the frank examination of theliterary life of to-day.
In speaking of what is proceeding around us no one can be trusted to beauthoritative. The wisest, clearest, and most experienced of criticshave notoriously been wrong about the phenomena of their own day.Ben Jonson selected the moment when Hamlet and Othello had justbeen performed to talk of raising "the despised head of poetry again,and[Pg x] stripping her of those rotten and base rags wherewith the timeshave adulterated her form." Neither Hazlitt nor Sainte Beuve could betrusted to give as valuable a judgment on the work of a man youngerthan themselves as they could of any past production, be it what itmight. To map the ground around his feet is a task that