Some Diversions of a Man of Letters — Themes and Context

Fluctuations of Taste and the Critic's Predicament

In the preface, Gosse describes how a critic who has championed new forms in youth may later find his own idols discarded. He does not propose a solution, but the tension between personal attachment and critical detachment runs through the book. The essay on the Wartons, for instance, treats their revival of medieval and Spenserian modes as a deliberate reaction against neoclassical taste—an early example of generational shift. Gosse notes that the Wartons were themselves 'dispossessed' by later movements, suggesting that no school holds permanent sway. This pattern recurs in his discussion of the Brontës, whose raw emotional power was initially met with bewilderment before being canonized. Gosse's method is to trace these reversals without claiming final judgment, leaving the reader to observe the process rather than adopt a fixed stance.

Portrait of a Spectator: Lady Dorothy Nevill

The longest single portrait in the collection is of Lady Dorothy Nevill, a Victorian hostess whom Gosse presents as a pure spectator of life. He recounts how she bought horseflesh from a Mayfair shop 'in the presence of a jeering populace,' and how she described her existence as a 'treadmill of friendship, perpetually on the go.' Her letters reveal a comic impatience with rural calm: after fleeing to the country, she soon complains that 'the country is so full of ladies' and longs for 'the flesh-pots of dear dirty old London.' Gosse emphasizes that she had no impulse toward active benevolence, despite possessing the courage and tolerance that might have made her a reformer. She was, he says, 'not an actor, but a spectator,' and her wit—which he postpones discussing—is the quality toward which all her traits converge. The portrait is built from specific anecdotes and quoted phrases, avoiding abstract praise.

War Poetry and the Limits of Expression

The final essays turn to poetry written during and about the First World War. Gosse examines soldier poets such as Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon, though the excerpts provided do not include his full analysis. He also writes on 'The Future of English Poetry' and 'The Agony of the Victorian Age,' suggesting that the war has forced a reckoning with earlier certainties. In the preface, he had already noted that changes in taste 'must go on, whether they hurt the living and the dead, or no,' and this stoic acceptance colors his treatment of war verse. He does not claim that the new poetry is superior; rather, he observes how the extremity of experience strains conventional forms. The essay 'Some Soldier Poets' likely catalogues individual voices, but the surviving text is too fragmentary to reconstruct his judgments. What remains clear is Gosse's insistence that criticism must adapt to historical rupture, even when the critic's own preferences are rendered obsolete.

Gosse's collection resists easy summary because its essays are deliberately miscellaneous—'diversions' in the eighteenth-century sense of amusements or digressions. Readers will find the most sustained pleasure in the portrait of Lady Dorothy Nevill, where Gosse's anecdotal method yields a character both vivid and elusive. The preface on fluctuating taste provides a useful key to the whole: Gosse is less concerned with defending a canon than with observing how canons are made and unmade. Those interested in the reception of the Brontës, Sterne, or Hardy will find measured, historically informed commentary, while the war essays offer a contemporary perspective on poetry written under extreme pressure.

That rainy afternoon, Gosse’s essay on fluctuating taste kept me company, his musings on literary permanence drifting like the drizzle outside. It made me wonder how my own judgments would shift. Later, idly, I picked up the third volume of Jefferson’s papers, finding a similar quiet wrestling with what endures—Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, From the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 3 — Themes and Context a companion in its own unhurried way.