gentleness of a modern dentist extracting a tooth.  He keeps up a steady conversation of praise while doing the damage.  The truth is out before you know.  One becomes suddenly aware that the author has ceased to be as coldly perfect as a tailor’s model, and is a queer-looking creature with a gap in his jaw.  It is possible that the author, were he alive, would feel furious, as a child sometimes feels with the dentist.  None the less, Mr. Gosse has done him a service.  The man who extracts a truth is as much to be commended as the man who extracts a tooth.  It is not the function of the biographer any more than it is that of a dentist to prettify his subject.  Each is an enemy of decay, a furtherer of life.  There is such a thing as painless biography, but it is the work of quacks.  Mr. Gosse is one of those honest dentists who reassure you by allowing it to hurt you “just a little.”

This gift for telling the truth is no small achievement in a man of letters.  Literature is a broom that sweeps lies out of the mind, and fortunate is the man who wields it.  Unhappily, while Mr. Gosse is daring in portraiture, he is the reverse in comment.  In comment, as his writings on the war showed, he will fall in with the cant of the times.  He can see through the cant of yesterday with a sparkle in his eyes, but he is less critical of the cant of to-day.  He is at least fond of throwing out saving clauses, as when, writing of Mr. Sassoon’s verse, he says:  “His temper is not altogether to be applauded, for such sentiments must tend to relax the effort of the struggle, yet they can hardly be reproved when conducted with so much honesty and courage.”  Mr. Gosse again writes out of the official rather than the imaginative mind when, speaking of the war poets, he observes: 

    It was only proper that the earliest of all should be the Poet
    Laureate’s address to England, ending with the prophecy: 

      Much suffering shall cleanse thee! 
        But thou through the flood
      Shall win to salvation,
        To Beauty through blood.

Had a writer of the age of Charles II. written a verse like that, Mr. Gosse’s chortles would have disturbed the somnolent peace of the House of Peers.  Even if it had been written in the time of Albert the Good, he would have rent it with the destructive dagger of a phrase.  As it is, one is not sure that Mr. Gosse regards this appalling scrap from a bad hymnal as funny.  One hopes that he quoted it with malicious intention.  But did he?  Was it not Mr. Gosse who early in the war glorified the blood that was being shed as a cleansing stream of Condy’s Fluid?  The truth is, apart from his thoughts about literature, Mr. Gosse thinks much as the leader-writers tell him.  He is sensitive to beauty of style and to idiosyncrasy of character, but he lacks philosophy and that tragic sense that gives the deepest sympathy.  That, we fancy, is why we would rather read him on Catherine Trotter, the precursor of the bluestockings, than on any subject connected with the war.