The Master, the Modern Major General, and His Clever Wife: Henry James's Letters to Field Marshal Lord Wolseley and Lady Wolseley, 1878–1913

By Henry James

As his letters attest, for nearly forty years Henry James enjoyed a warm and gratifying friendship with Britain’s foremost soldier of the last quarter of the nineteenth century and his wife. The Wolseleys were notable figures. Lord Wolseley, the field marshal who became Britain’s commander in chief of the British army, was a national hero. Both a bibliophile and an author, Wolseley was described by Henry James to his brother William as an "excellent example of the cultivated British soldier." Lady Wolseley was also well-read, as well as stylish, strong-willed, and shrewd, and in Henry’s view, a delightful correspondent—in short, as the editor writes, "precisely the kind of woman James most admired."

In The Master, the Modern Major General, and His Clever Wife, Alan James offers a collection of more than one hundred letters—most of them published here for the first time—that Henry James wrote to the Wolseleys, the majority to Lady Wolseley. Included are an overall introduction to the letters; separate introductory profiles of Lord and Lady Wolseley along with commentaries on the factors that drew James and the Wolseleys together; introductions to each of four sections of the letters, divided chronologically; and annotations throughout, identifying the notable men and women to whom James refers as well as comparing what James and the Wolseleys thought of them and their work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Nov 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9780813932712

Henry James

Henry James (1843-1916), the son of the religious philosopher Henry James Sr. and brother of the psychologist and philosopher William James, published many important novels including Daisy Miller, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and The Ambassadors.

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The Master, the Modern Major General, and His Clever Wife

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THE MASTER THE MODERN MAJOR GENERAL AND HIS CLEVER WIFE

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Henry James’s Letters to Field Marshal Lord Wolseley and Lady Wolseley, 1878–1913

Edited by Alan G. James

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS

Charlottesville and London

To Marjorie

University of Virginia Press

© 2012 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2012

1  3  5  7  9  8  6  4  2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

James, Henry, 1843–1916.

[Correspondence. Selections]

The master, the modern Major General, and his clever wife : Henry James’s letters to Field Marshal Lord Wolseley and Lady Wolseley, 1878–1913 / edited by Alan G. James.

p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3235-4 (cloth : acid-free paper) —

ISBN 978-0-8139-3271-2 (e-book)

1. James, Henry, 1843–1916—Correspondence. 2. Authors, American—19th century—Correspondence. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Correspondence. 4. Wolseley, Garnet Wolseley, Viscount, 1833–1913—Correspondence. 5. Wolseley, Louisa, Viscountess, 1843–1920—Correspondence. I. Wolseley, Garnet Wolseley, Viscount, 1833–1913. II. Wolseley, Louisa, Viscountess, 1843–1920. III. James, Alan G., 1920– IV. Title.

PS2123.A4 2012b

813′.4—dc23

2012003434

Letters 74 and 97 and brief excerpts from 16 other letters reprinted by permission of the publisher from Henry James Letters: Volumes I–IV, edited by Leon Edel, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1974, 1975, 1980, 1984 by Leon Edel, Editorial; Copyright © 1974, 1975, 1980, 1984 by Alexander R. James, James copyright material.

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CONTENTS

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Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Editor’s Note

THE LETTERS

1878 to 1885

1886 to 1895

1896 to 1900

1901 to 1913

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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I acknowledge with many thanks the courtesy of the following institutions and collections for giving me access to material in their holdings relevant to the friendship of Henry James and Lord and Lady Wolseley (as described in the bibliography) and for permission to publish parts or all of that material: Center for Henry James Studies, Creighton University, Omaha Nebraska; Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, Chester, England; Special Collections, Miller Library, Colby College, Waterville, Maine; Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Wolseley Archive, Hove Library, Hove, England; The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; The Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library, Leeds, England; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville; and South Lanarkshire Leisure and Cultural Libraries and Museums, Hamilton, Scotland.

I am indebted to Ms. Bay James, of Marbury, Massachusetts, who is literary executrix of Henry James, for her kind authorization to publish materials from the James papers at the Houghton Library, The Huntington Library, and the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.

To many individuals I am obligated for generous assistance in producing this book. My principal debt is to two: Zoë Lubowiecka, Library Officer, Hove Library; and Professor Greg Zacharias, Director, Center for Henry James Studies, Creighton University. Both offered invaluable, indeed I should say indispensable, aid. For their myriad courtesies (among many others, calling my attention to material of which I had not been aware), interest, and encouragement I am profoundly grateful.

I am indebted also to a score of others who responded to my inquiries and requests. Indeed, only one person of all to whom I wrote for information did not respond. My thanks go to: Matthew Alexander, Guildford Museum, Guildford, England; Matthew Bailey and Adam Grummitt, National Portrait Gallery, London; Dr. Iain Brown and Sheila MacKenzie, National Library of Scotland; Patricia Burdick, Miller Library, Colby College; Philip Bye and Christopher Wittick, East Sussex County Council, Lewes, England; Gareth Cheeseman and Terry Mackenzie, South Lanarkshire County Council Museums; Gayle Cooper and Edward Gaynor, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia; Erica Danowitz, formerly of the American University Library, Washington, DC; Kasia Drozdziak and Jill Winder, The Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library; Rebecca Gomez and Janie C. Morris, Duke University Library, Durham, North Carolina; Viscount Hamden of Glynde, Glynde, England; Alan Hibbs, Lewes Library, Lewes, England; Steven Jobe, Hanover College, Hanover, Indiana; the late Rt. Hon. Sir Geoffrey Johnson Smith; Tara Knapp, formerly of the Center for Henry James Studies; Peter McInally, formerly of the British Information Services, New York; Jonathan Peppler, Cheshire Archives and Local Studies; Jennie Rathbun, formerly of the Houghton Library; Margaret Richard, archivist to the Duke of Beaufort, Badminton, England; Etienne de Rufz de Lavison, Paris; the late Adeline R. Tintner; and David Zeidberg, Sara Hodson, and Rebecca Tuttle, The Huntington Library.

I am fortunate to have the assistance of an able amanuensis, Martha Adams, of Glen Allen, Virginia. I cannot praise too highly her initiative and technical proficiency. I salute University of Virginia Press editors Joanne Allen and Mark Mones for their patience and their kind consideration in helping me through the complexities of preparing the text for publication, and Margie Towery for drawing together the index. My wife, Marjorie, has offered perceptive comments about Henry James and his work, which I welcome with love, appreciation, and benefit.

For omissions, errors, and any other shortcomings I alone am accountable.

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ABBREVIATIONS

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INTRODUCTION

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A Unique Friendship

Edmund Gosse, an intimate of both Henry James and Lord and Lady Wolseley, asserted that James made a thousand acquaintances and a dozen durable friendships (A&I 26). Whatever the actual number (certainly more than twelve—Gosse had an irresistible compulsion to exaggerate for effect), one of the durable friendships James made in England was the one he enjoyed with Garnet and Louisa Wolseley, which spanned nearly four decades and encompassed virtually all of James’s productive life and much of Wolseley’s.

James’s friendship with Lord and Lady Wolseley was unique among those he formed in Britain. His closest friends were, for the most part, writers and artists, although he made significant friendships outside the literary and artistic world, with politicians and soldiers and their wives. Of his military and political friends, however, only the Wolseleys held a place comparable to those of James’s good literary and artistic friends.

At first it might seem strange that James and Wolseley, England’s soldier-hero of the Victorian era, became good friends, for the basis of the attraction between the dabbler in the spectacle of life and the man of action is not self-evident. Gosse noted the paradox: It might be supposed that there was little in common between the active soldier and the exquisite and meticulous dreamer. On the contrary, he declared, their mutual esteem was persistent…. Their admiration, each for the other, was continuous (284).

Wolseley was not only an unexcelled student and practitioner of the military art; he was also a bibliophile and author with original tastes in literature and art. Aptly was it said of him, as James could testify, that he surprised those he met and talked to by displaying tastes they little thought to find in a soldier (LOLW 41). Although James knew a number of other cultivated British military types whose company he enjoyed, Wolseley was probably the only man in uniform with whom he formed (gradually but surely) a close and lasting friendship that had intellectual substance. That James and Lady Wolseley should have been quickly drawn to each other is more readily understandable. She had tastes and interests that James might have been surprised to find in a soldier’s wife, but his surprise can have been only momentary. Attractive, articulate, urbane, like her husband she was an authentic bibliophile.

The Wolseleys were accomplished people. Even among illustrious Victorian contemporaries they were eminent. So it is hardly surprising that James was attracted to them, and they to him. Shared values and interests exerted a stronger pull than differences in background, temperament, or vocation. Theirs was a harmonious friendship. In none of the surviving papers of James or the Wolseleys is there even a hint that they ever exchanged harsh words or had a serious disagreement. But their social intercourse cannot have been dull; the Wolseleys were no more commonplace than James.

Although not voluminous, James’s letters to the Wolseleys testify eloquently to the solidity of the friendship and illustrate how he nurtured it. In his correspondence, he reveals more about himself and his complex psyche than he does about his craft. For theirs was not a friendship like those he enjoyed with men and women of the British literary establishment; the Wolseleys were literate friends, not literary peers.

James and the Wolseleys flourished in a rich, powerful Britain, in what Winston Churchill (1874–1965)¹ called the long era of peace, prosperity and progress which filled Queen Victoria’s famous reign. This was the British Antonine Age (Great Contemporaries 95). How these Victorians busied themselves and contended about minor things, Churchill observed. What long, brilliant, impassioned letters they wrote each other about refined personal and political issues of which the modern Juggernaut progression takes no account. It was, he wrote in an essay on his friend the Earl of Rosebery, who succeeded Gladstone as prime minister, an age of great men and small events (23). James’s letters to the Wolseleys afford glimpses of some of the great (and not so great) men and women who graced this golden age and some of the minor things that preoccupied them.

The setting of the James-Wolseley friendship was the beau monde of late Victorian and Edwardian England. Society in that time, wrote William Mallock (1849–1923), a chronicler of the era, was distinguished by its comparative smallness and its practically unquestioned position (Memoirs of Life and Literature 92). It was founded, Mallock observed, on the hereditary possession of land, the nucleus being the heads of more or less ancient families whose rent rolls enabled them to occupy London houses and play an agreeable and ornamental part in the business of entertaining and being entertained for the few months called ‘the season’ (92).

Although exclusive, London society was not impenetrable. Certain qualifications, in the way of birth being given, Mallock noted, mere personal charm and accomplishment would often secure for their possessors a high place in its ranks (92). In this privileged stratum, James and the Wolseleys won a place—the novelist by his pen, the soldier by his sword, and Lady Wolseley by wit, intelligence, and marriage to a national hero.

The social milieu in which the three moved had many faces. In some circles, wealth and position set the tone. Neither James nor the Wolseleys found those circles particularly appealing. There were, however, coteries in which cultivation, taste, enthusiasm for art and literature, and clever talk were prized. Lord David Cecil (1902–1986) described one in the foreword to the girlhood reminiscences of his mother-in-law, Mary MacCarthy (1882–1953). (Mary married Desmond MacCarthy [1877–1952], a friend of James’s old age, a literary journalist and one of the famous talkers of the day.) The society in which Mary and her family moved, Cecil wrote, was a civilized and agreeable society remarkable for taste and wit and sensibility; also for rich culture, romantic and pre-Raphaelite in atmosphere, and with enough money and leisure with which to make the most of it (MacCarthy, A Nineteenth-Century Childhood 8). To such aesthetically satisfying surroundings James and the Wolseleys gravitated naturally.

James’s life and work enjoy seemingly endless vogue, while the Wolseley name has passed into oblivion—or merged in confusion with that of a sixteenth century cardinal (Lehmann, Model Major General 9). The Master’s friendship with an almost forgotten soldier, quintessential paladin of imperial Britain, and his fascinating wife is not, however, simply an antique curiosity. Their long attachment and the way they enriched one another’s lives have an ineffable appeal. For as Lytton Strachey said of four eminent contemporaries of James and the Wolseleys, Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past; they have a value which is independent of any temporal processes—which is eternal and must be felt for its own sake (Eminent Victorians vi).

Our Only Soldier

Garnet Joseph Wolseley was born near Dublin on June 4, 1833.² From childhood he was imbued with the martial spirit. Military service was a family tradition: his father had fought for England in the Napoleonic Wars; his grandfather, in the Seven Years’ War; and his great-grandfather, in the Irish War. After he and his mother made repeated appeals to the Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) for a commission, the commander in chief acceded, and in 1852, at age nineteen, Wolseley was commissioned, without purchase,³ an ensign in the British army. In the twenty years after he put on the queen’s uniform, Wolseley fought with extraordinary bravery in England’s wars in Burma, Crimea, India (the Mutiny), China,⁴ and Canada.

Ambition, the soldier’s virtue, spurred Wolseley to seek fame and high command. His faith in God’s providence, joined to an eager temperament and an ambitious nature, produced a rare degree of courage, observed a biographer, son of one of Wolseley’s closest comrades in arms (DNB 1912–21 586). Disdainful of danger, he pursued honor and duty by applying to himself his own principle that the first business of the young officer who wishes to distinguish himself is to seek to get himself killed (586). Elan got him wounded four times and mentioned in dispatches nine. As reward for putting down a rebellion on the Red River in Canada with extraordinary rapidity and no bloodshed, he was knighted in 1871.

The Ashanti War (1873–74), a little war in which the elements were as fierce as the enemy, made Wolseley a national hero. For restoring imperial authority in the rebellious Gold Coast (now Ghana) with dispatch and at modest cost in lives and money, he was promoted to major general and invested with new honors of knighthood by the queen. Victoria (1819–1901) was impressed when she received him after reviewing his little army in the spring of 1874, writing in her journal on March 22: After luncheon saw Sir G. Wolseley. He looks thin and grey but well, and is very smart, active, wiry-looking. He said he had recovered his health, but that the climate was awful, ‘like a steam bath’ (Victoria, Letters 331).

Prime Minister Disraeli (1804–1881) met the hero of the hour to learn what he expected from the government as reward for his services, and afterward he pictured Wolseley to his friend Lady Chesterfield as follows: "He is a little man [five feet seven], but with a good presence, and bright blue eye,⁵ holds his head well and has a lithe figure; he is only 40; so has a great career before him" (Buckle, Life of Benjamin Disraeli 5:305).

Wolseley was a superpatriot; I am a jingo, he confessed to his wife (LLLW 47; 20 Mar. 1880). To see England great is my highest ambition and to lead in contributing to that greatness is my only real ambition, he wrote to her after his victory at Tel-el-Kebir, in Egypt (82; 28 Sept. 1882).

Disraeli’s dictum that a great country is an imperial country (R. James, British Revolution 1:25–26) was an article of faith for Wolseley. In a career that spanned the age of imperialism, Wolseley sedulously defended and promoted the cause of empire. The Liberal Party might define imperialism as the assertion of absolute force over others (31). Wolseley, however, believed that the empire was a beneficent institution, and his enduring contempt for William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) stemmed in no small part from the fact that the Grand Old Man was a little Englander. On his death, the Times praised Wolseley as an unexcelled champion of the empire: How much he did to uphold the Imperial ideal which Great Britain shared with ancient Rome, can be read in his life (Lord Wolseley and St. Paul’s).

To Wolseley it was axiomatic that a great imperial country must have superior armed forces. The army he joined in 1852 was not an efficient instrument of imperial power. As the Crimean War (1854–56) made dolefully clear, it had become lethargic, mired in outworn doctrine, organization, and training. These deficiencies were all too plain to a young officer with drive and an original, probing mind. More than most soldiers or politicians of the day, Wolseley understood that unless Britain exploited the scientific developments that were revolutionizing warfare in the industrial age, it would not long remain a great power.

Early in his career Wolseley dedicated himself to revitalizing the army. His opening shot was the publication in 1869 of The Soldier’s Pocket-Book, the first manual to deal with preparations for war and the duties of officers and men in the field. Wolseley’s dogmatic but well-grounded criticisms of the army establishment immediately landed him in the black book of the Duke of Cambridge (1819–1904), commander in chief of the army and a first cousin of the queen. For the Royal George, as Wolseley called him, plainly regarded as heresy Wolseley’s provocative but perfectly valid observation that we are too prone to fall down before the great Duke [Wellington] and think that everything he did was right (Wolseley, Soldier’s Pocket-Book 2).

General Lord Wolseley in field uniform; bronze bust (29" high) sculpted by Mr. (later Sir) Joseph Edgar Boehm in 1883; NPG 1840. (By permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

From the time he entered the War Office in 1871 to the end of his career, Wolseley worked with reform-minded war secretaries to fashion a modern British army. In the end, he and the reformers prevailed. He had waged war against ignorance and negligence; he had striven—and won—for efficiency and progress, wrote his biographers (LOLW 341–42).

Invariably direct in discourse, Wolseley said what was on his mind, often oblivious to the fact that candor untempered by tact might not win his point. As Gosse observed with studied understatement, I cannot pretend that Lord Wolseley was a cautious speaker, but he added that his company would have been much less entertaining than it was if he had minced words or hedged his opinions (A&I 286). Small wonder that the Duke of Cambridge and other army traditionalists regarded Wolseley as a pushy upstart. Although the queen’s opinion of Wolseley would mellow over time, in 1879 she considered him unconciliatory, excessively ambitious, and too junior (at age 46!) to undertake a mission to South Africa on which Disraeli wanted to send him. The prime minister defended the proposed appointment, while conceding to the queen: It is quite true that Wolseley is an egotist and a braggart, but so was Nelson…. Men of action, when eminently successful in early life, are generally boastful and full of themselves. It is not limited to military and naval heroes (Buckle, Life of Benjamin Disraeli 6:435–36).

Disraeli had unbounded confidence in Wolseley. The general had not disappointed him, he observed to Lady Bradford in 1879, referring to the successful conclusion of the mission to South Africa on which the prime minister had sent him. He is one of those men who not only succeed, but succeed quickly, Disraeli asserted, while deploring the jealousy, hatred and all uncharitableness of the Horse Guards [army headquarters] against our only soldier (473). The Horse Guards may have found Wolseley a burr under their saddle, but the public lionized him. The press seized on Disraeli’s sobriquet and dubbed Wolseley our only general. The New York Times observed: The general respect for his integrity was reflected in a long-current phrase to describe an upright man: ‘He’s all Sir Garnet’ (General Wolseley). W. S. Gilbert, an acquaintance, satirized and celebrated him in the comic opera The Pirates of Penzance as the very model of a modern major general, and referred to the skill of Sir Garnet in thrashing a cannibal in Patience.

General Sir Reginald Wingate (1861–1953), who served under Wolseley in the Sudan, recalled that the field marshal was endowed with a clear brain, goodness of heart, strength of character and as much adroitness as simplicity (qtd. in LOLW xv). Toward people he liked and respected, Wolseley was warm and genial. No one, declared the Times, was a brighter or more charming companion (Death of Lord Wolseley). The Times stated what Wolseley’s many friends and acquaintances well knew. Men from divers walks of life—brother officers, politicians, and (remarkably) men of letters—enjoyed the company and robust talk of this brilliant soldier and most attractive of men (Morley, Recollections 1:341).

Women too found Wolseley sympathetic. Lady Battersea expressed the sentiments of many women when she wrote that he was a delightful guest, bright, chatty (Reminiscences 395). Like James, Wolseley accepted the equality of the sexes and genuinely enjoyed the company of women, especially women of spirit to whom books (reading and writing them) were important. Not surprisingly, he formed warm, lasting, but strictly nonromantic friendships with some of the most interesting and accomplished women of the day.

Universally and uncritically praised though he was during his life and after his death, Wolseley had his share of human frailties, as Disraeli acknowledged to Queen Victoria. No less vain than many other famous men, he was not reticent about self-promotion.

Philosophically, Wolseley was an authoritarian, contemptuous of politicians in general and of W. E. Gladstone and most of his Liberal Party colleagues in particular. Described as a host to Cromwellian phantoms, he once confided to his wife that he relished the coming of a time when the licence of democracy and socialism will be conquered by the sword, and succeeded by a cruel military despotism under which Gladstone and his colleagues would be forced to polish officers’ boots (L. James, Rise and Fall of the British Empire 324). His authoritarianism, however, was merely an abstraction; he never formulated a plan of action to implement it. What has been called his tendency to sinister caesarism (Oxford DNB 8) should not, therefore, be exaggerated. A realist, he always understood the restricted constitutional parameters within which the Army existed and the requirements of his political masters (8). While he might fulminate about the excesses of democracy and control of the military by mere civilians who knew nothing of war, he was no coup d’étatist.

Wolseley believed in la guerre à outrance, but he had no lust for killing. All things and the times considered, he was a decent man, solicitous of the well-being of his cavalry horses, but more important, he had an un-Wellington-like admiration and affection for his soldiers. The one bright spot in his fruitless expedition to rescue General Gordon in the Sudan, he wrote to his wife, was the splendid conduct of the private soldier. He is a splendid fellow…. I have lived the greater part of my life surrounded by them, and now that I grow old I feel as if they were my own sons (LLLW 213; 28 Apr. 1885).⁶

Purely social affairs bored Wolseley, but he reveled in book talk and made time in a busy schedule to converse with men of letters. A favorite haunt was the Literary Society, a select talking club, to which he was elected in 1877. For more than forty years he attended its meetings, where he found congenial intellectual companionship. His diaries record the attendance of luminaries such as Henry James’s early guide in London, Lord Houghton; the traveler and explorer Sir Richard Burton; the surgeon and author of medical treatises Sir James Paget; and the historians George Otto Trevelyan, William Lecky, and Spencer Walpole, president of the society. Wolseley was also a perennial patron of the Royal Academy. Conversant with the art of painting (he sketched and painted pleasing watercolors), he surveyed with a discriminating eye the work of leading artists of the day, with many of whom he and Louisa were friendly.⁷

Family resources were too modest to afford Wolseley much formal education. However, he inherited from his soldier father and his mother (widowed when he was seven years old) an exact and mathematical mind (Wolseley, Story of a Soldier’s Life 1:8), which, thanks to his mother’s encouragement and his own exertions, he honed to a keen edge. From his mother, who was extraordinarily well read, Wolseley also inherited a lifelong passion for books, a debt he dutifully acknowledged in the preface to his chef d’oeuvre, The Life of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, to the Accession of Queen Anne (1894): I dedicate this book to the Memory of my Mother who taught me to read.

Gosse was bemused by Wolseley’s love of books. He had a predilection and even a passion for literature, wrote Gosse, which he shared, I should think, with no man of action of his time … and if I essay a snapshot of him I am bound to show him with a book in his hand (A&I 274). Wolseley’s reading was catholic. He did not read idly but to weigh and consider. From his earliest days the literature of warfare fascinated him. I devoured every work on the theory and practice of war that I could beg, borrow or afford to buy, he recalled in his memoirs (Wolseley, Story of a Soldier’s Life 1:8). He also read widely in other fields to prepare himself for the positions of high command and administration to which he aspired. He clearly intended reading to make him a full man. In particular, he savored the works of his and James’s friends George Otto Trevelyan, John Morley, and Andrew Lang. Wolseley read little fiction but knew and evidently enjoyed the books of authors ranging from Sir Walter Scott to George Eliot,⁸ George Meredith, Rhoda Broughton, and Vernon Lee (nom de plume of Violet Paget).

Gosse discovered early in their friendship that Wolseley had a constant temptation to use his pen (A&I 277). He found this surprising, for he had thought of Wolseley as a reader but hardly as a writer, although he noted that Andrew Lang had once told him that Wolseley had produced a novel under a feigned name; this I had not seen, and Lang did not encourage me to hunt for it (277). On learning of Wolseley’s literary aspirations, Gosse encouraged him to write on matters on the fringe of his daily occupation (277). Whereas James denigrated Wolseley’s literary style (as will later appear), Gosse appreciated that he could write instructively and felicitously on matters of which he had unique knowledge, namely, military leaders and warfare. A gifted amateur, Wolseley wrote easily and on the whole rather well and has to his credit a number of nonfiction books and articles that, as the New York Times noted, were read respectfully (General Wolseley).

About his literary aspirations Wolseley was realistic to the point of self-deprecation. A perfectionist in every task to which he set his hand, he strove constantly to achieve fluency by seeking the advice and counsel of literary friends and acquaintances. Foremost among