Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/questionsatissue00gossuoft QUESTIONS AT ISSUE * * * * * * _Other Works by Mr. EDMUND GOSSE_ _IN VERSE_ _On Viol and Flute. New edition. 1890_ _Firdausi in Exile, and other Poems. Second edition. 1887_ _IN PROSE_ _Northern Studies. 1879. Popular edition. 1890_ _Life of Gray. 1882. Revised edition. 1889_ _Seventeenth Century Studies. 1883. Second edition. 1885_ _Life of Congreve. 1888_ _A History of Eighteenth Century Literature. 1889. Second edition. 1891_ _Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S. 1890_ _Gossip in a Library. 1891. Second edition. 1892_ _The Secret of Narcisse. A Romance. 1892_ * * * * * * QUESTIONS AT ISSUE by EDMUND GOSSE [Illustration: Logo] 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 at once, I hope, describes them accurately and distinguishes them from criticism of a more positive order. When a writer speaks to us of the works of the dead masters, of the literary life of the past, we demand from him the authoritative attitude. That Homer is a great poet, and that the verse of Milton is exquisite, are not Questions at Issue. In dealing with such subjects the critic must persuade himself that he is capable of forming an opinion, and must then give us his opinion definitely. But in the continent of literary criticism, where all else is imperial, there is a province which is still republican, and that is the analysis of contemporary literature, the frank examination of the literary life of to-day. In speaking of what is proceeding around us no one can be trusted to be authoritative. The wisest, clearest, and most experienced of critics have notoriously been wrong about the phenomena of their own day. Ben Jonson selected the moment when _Hamlet_ and _Othello_ had just been performed to talk of raising "the despised head of poetry again, and stripping her of those rotten and base rags wherewith the times have adulterated her form." Neither Hazlitt nor Sainte Beuve could be trusted to give as valuable a judgment on the work of a man younger than themselves as they could of any past production, be it what it might. To map the ground around his feet is a task that the most skilful geographer is not certain to carry out with success.