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 in