William Ober Raymond 1880–1970
William Ober Raymond was born in Stanley, New Brunswick, on 23 November 1880, the son of Archdeacon William Ober Raymond and of Julia Raymond née Nelson. Having grown up in New Brunswick, he never lost his affection for that province and returned there in later life whenever he could. He graduated with a B.A. from the University of New Brunswick in 1902 (his father had been the first honours graduate of that university) and, after taking the Licentiate in Theology at the Montreal Diocesan College in 1905, was ordained deacon in that year and priest in 1906, and served for two years as pastor of St George’s Church at McAdam Junction, N.B. In September 1907 he married Florence Gillespie of Toronto and was appointed assistant at St Andrew’s Church, Ann Arbor, Michigan. By 1914 – the year he received his M.A. in English from the University of Michigan – he had decided to follow an academic career while continuing in orders, and was appointed an instructor in English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He received his PH.D. from Michigan in 1916 and continued to teach there for fourteen years until his appointment in 1928 as professor of English at Bishop’s University, Lennoxville, Quebec. There in his twenty-two years of service he did much to strengthen the tradition of humane studies that had been established and maintained by a small group of dedicated and versatile men of learning. His retirement in 1950, postponed to help meet the demands made on the universities at the end of the war, was marked by the award of the D.C.L. honoris causa. He continued to live in Lennoxville until his wife died in March 1959, and thereafter divided his time between Toronto and England. It is a tribute to his intellectual vigour and determination that, despite the death of his wife and the indignity of increasing physical infirmity, he continued to be a familiar figure at the libraries of the University of Toronto and the British Museum, and the work he published after 1950 represents nearly half of his small canon of writing.
In 1925 he had published in New York an anthology of Swinburne’s poetry with an introduction and notes, but his mature scholarly interests lay elsewhere. In 1928-29, at the time of his move from Ann Arbor to Bishop’s, the first three of his learned articles appeared in Modern Language Notes and PMLA. He was then forty-eight, and this work, the fruit of prolonged and mature study, was of such quality that his election to the Royal Society of Canada in 1936 recognized his reputation as an outstanding exponent of the work of Robert Browning (1812-89). The longest of the three essays – “Browning and Higher Criticism” – brought his training in theology and biblical criticism into focus with his detailed study of Browning’s poetry. The other two – on the genesis and documentary sources of The Ring and the Book – are models of scholarly inference; they were promptly welcomed by Browning scholars, and were later to be endorsed by documentary discoveries made by himself and others.
A careful and stylish writer, Raymond published altogether less than twenty essays and articles, five of them after 1950. Yet as his retirement approached, his peers persuaded this most modest of men to collect nine of his essays into a volume with an introductory essay and a review of Browning scholarship. The Infinite Moment, published by the University of Toronto Press in 1950, was reissued in 1965 in a second edition with three new essays added. This volume refracts through a total of thirteen papers the essence not only of his Browning scholarship but also of his highly civilized literary sensibility. Among his uncollected essays we find in 1947 a paper on “Motivation and Character Portrayal in Othello,” and in 1951 a general essay on the nature of poetry – “The Mind’s Internal Heaven” – and an account of Philip Henry Gosse’s zoological activities in Canada in the early nineteenth century as an affectionate postscript to his vigorous defence of Gosse’s son Edmond in 1945. In 1953 he wrote for the Royal Society of Canada an eloquent obituary of his old friend and crony George Herbert Clarke.
William Raymond did well to reprint in their original form the two inferential essays of 1928 not only because “the processes of investigation which led to their conclusions are of some interest” but also because they disclose in his earliest published work the virtues of his technical scholarship – the imaginative flair that guided his scrupulous handling of evidence, the accuracy of his judgment, the deftness of his procedure. His scholarship was never merely technical nor intensely specialized; it was always informed by a sensitive awareness of the human context of any literary inquiry – a quality that above all allowed him convincingly to vindicate Sir Edmund Gosse against charges of implication in the literary forgeries of Thomas J. Wise. The case against Wise, published by John Carter and Graham Pollard in 1934, was incontrovertible. But in 1944 Miss Fanny Ratchford, in the preface to her edition of Wise’s correspondence with John Henry Wrenn, ascribed guilt and complicity in Wise’s production of spurious pamphlets to a “group of conspirators,” among them Sir Edmund Gosse. The muted dignity of Raymond’s essay cannot conceal his indignation, but it also shows how aware he was of the way the consideration of documentary evidence can overflow into a most delicate moral weighing of persons. Gosse was a man of letters, widely esteemed as critic and lecturer, as poet and biographer; admittedly he was self-taught, an intellectual arriviste, “careless in factual matters, and never had the critical acumen of the exact scholar,” yet as the author of Father and Son he was worthy of the highest personal respect whatever might be said about his scholarship; Gosse had died in 1928 and could not defend himself, and Raymond had come to know his son Philip. On the other hand, Thomas Wise had been generous to Raymond over the years; Wise “had a genius for friendship, and, as many a university man in England and America could testify, was always ready to place his knowledge and the resources of the Ashley Library at the disposal of any young scholar.” Raymond could never understand why Wise should have sent him “the proof sheets of the most notorious cock-and-bull story he ever told” about the “Reading edition” of Sonnets from the Portuguese, but Wise had corresponded with him as a friend, and even after the disclosures by Carter and Pollard had responded to Raymond’s characteristic advice “to vindicate his good name even at the expense of his reputation as an expert bibliographer.” As for Miss Ratchford’s charges, based upon her privileged acquaintance with the Wrenn collection of books, manuscripts, and Wise forgeries in the University of Texas library, her work was certainly the outcome of “painstaking and scholarly research,” and her handling of the material was “incisive and sensitive”; nevertheless “her case against Sir Edmund Gosse is not substantiated.” Raymond examines the evidence patiently and carefully, having in mind the Thomas Wise that he had known and that Carter and Pollard had uncovered, and the Edmund Gosse that he knew through his work and the personal evidence of his son, and his minute knowledge of Browning’s work and life and the scholarship that had grown around it. He weighs the various arguments; separates out the threads of implication, chronology, and alleged motive; considers on Wise’s part the known felonious intent, and on Gosse’s part the chances of pardonable error compounded by vanity, impatience, and ignorance. In the end we are utterly convinced: Edmund Gosse cannot have been a conspirator with Wise. And what finally convinces us is not simply the masterly handling of the evidence but the quality of the witness – fair, clear, firm, taking no recourse in polemical rhetoric or in the sophistic devices of an adversary proceeding. What Raymond gives is not an “opinion” but a judgment, and we recall that the quality of a judgment, as an act, directly bespeaks the quality of the person judging. Here indeed the style is the man.
Though William Raymond’s early papers were detailed and somewhat technical, even these are informed by his humanity and by the colour of his character. From his lectures on English literature to freshmen you would never had guessed that in the world’s eyes he was a learned specialist, an eminent “Browning scholar.” He had broad tastes and his intimate knowledge of the whole field of standard literature never allowed him to descend to rejective partisanship or to baffling minutiae. His preparation was scrupulous and detailed; he read his lectures but never repeated one; in all the details of his work as an instructor he was meticulous, in his marking of assignments appreciative and encouraging. He urged others to explore, and was always insisting, especially in private, that anybody seriously interested in literature or in writing must be acutely aware of contemporary work. He was an enthusiast, a “romantic” in his own sense of the word – the sense he explored in “The Infinite Moment” where he declares his admiration for the impetuous fertility of Browning’s poetic intelligence. He loved literature – poetry particularly – as a source of wonder, delight, and sanity, for the light it threw continuously and subtly upon life.
That he was able to convey this as strongly as he did in public is remarkable, for lecturing was always for him a formidable duty and impromptu speech before an audience did not come readily. Certainly his delivery was eccentric enough to provide irreverent youths with models for mocking imitation. He spoke with careful and grave deliberation, shaping each phrase – often felicitously – with hesitation; and in public he spoke, it seemed, through some impediment nervous or physical, with a constricted intonation that in fact concealed the daily heroism that he brought to his task as a lecturer and preacher. I think it is true that if he had to lecture in the forenoon he could eat no breakfast. Yet there was no mistaking the emotional force and intellectual vigour of his instruction as counterpoint to the grave decorum of his prose style, the gentle vulnerability of his manner, his courtly civility, his apparent withdrawal from “the world.” A similar paradox afflicted his way of walking, which was measured, prim, and (it seemed) coordinated only with effort. Yet he was an indefatigible walker at all seasons and in all weathers, and on the tennis court until well past his seventieth year he was an agile and astute player, loving the game perhaps most because it gave him his one opportunity to practise unabashed cunning. If there was much evidence of an endearing absent-mindedness in the management of his cigarettes (and he did not have the hands of a craftsman or a surgeon), or in the fulfilment of his wife’s commissions in the village or the provision of a kettle for a guest’s early morning tea, he was never at a loss for a student’s name or forgot an appointment or neglected the interests or preoccupation of a guest; and in his bridge–playing (which he also loved) he had a flair for detail as in his scholarship and a commanding perception of a single line of possibilities that could catch a confident but unwary opponent – or partner – seriously off balance. I think the absent-mindedness was some sort of self-protecting cocoon that secured inviolate his sweetness of temper, his innocence, his sense of wonder, his generous expectation that some student or colleague would have the makings of a person of more consequence than himself.
Within the small compass of his published work and the limited though finely attuned range of his prose style the positive qualities of this quiet and impressive man are clearly to be seen – all but the eccentricities: these never seem to have reached the tip of his pen, or if they did they were stopped there out of propriety never to take substance in that bold, square, forthright hand of his. Fortunately his work does not suffer the erosion that besets whatever is merely technical, topical, or adventiously polemical. He could write with refined, almost nostalgic, delicacy about Isa Blagden; in the face of the foremost Shakespearean scholars of his day he could, as a man who somehow knew men, unfold Othello’s inscrutable character with complete composure; what struck him in Fifine at the Fair was “the poignancy and human interest” of Browning’s own life behind the poem; the opening essay of The Infinite Moment celebrates Browning’s vitality, and the closing essay confidently acquits Browning of “the imputation of insincerity and hypocrisy” in his essay on Shelley. Not “findings,” but germs, small and of unique individuality, and some of them of long and deep growth. I doubt whether even the self-confidence of contemporary scholarship could dismiss as conservative and critically archaic these open declarations of a richly informed mind and of a sensitive nature that placed no limit to his hospitality. I myself owe him more than I can now be fully aware of, and so do many others whose lives long ago digressed from academe and the study of letters.