IV
Like most Irishmen, Lord Roberts had a keen sense of humour. At a public dinner at which I was present he had for a near neighbour, at the high table, Lord Willoughby de Broke, who in his after-dinner speech had occasion to refer to the Territorial Army.
“If I am asked,” he said, “whether a young man should join the Territorial Army, my answer is invariably ‘Yes,’ and for three reasons. The first reason is that he will, perhaps for the first time in his life, be coming under the salutary influence of Discipline, and I say confidently and without fear of contradiction, that there is no finer influence for a young fellow than that of Discipline.”
These were sentiments that appealed to a soldier, and of the many approving cries of “Hear! Hear!” which came from all parts of the room, none rang more whole-heartedly than those of Lord Roberts.
“My second reason,” went on the speaker, “is that the young man will thereby be discharging a patriotic duty. To-day we are all thinking too much of our rights, rarely of our responsibilities, and in my opinion every able-bodied young fellow, whether he be a duke’s son, a draper’s son, or the son of a costermonger, should be trained to defend his country against an invader in her hour of need.”
Once again Lord Willoughby de Broke was expressing the very sentiments with which Lord Roberts’ name was so closely associated, and again it was the great soldier’s “Hear! Hear!” which was most emphatic.
“And lastly,” concluded the speaker, “my reason for advising every young fellow to join the Territorial Army is that it gives him a chance of—getting away from his wife for a night or a week or a fortnight without putting him to the trouble of hashing up some silly excuse which she knows is as palpably a fake and a lie as he does himself.”
Thus far Lord Willoughby de Broke had spoken with such grave earnestness that we were all prepared as heartily to endorse his third reason as his previous ones. Lord Roberts had, in fact, raised his right hand above his left to applaud when the speaker sprang this surprise upon us, and especially upon those of us who were married, for the dinner was graced by the presence of Lady Willoughby de Broke and Lady Roberts, as well as by other ladies, the wives, daughters, and sisters of those present.
For one second the company, if I may so phrase it, “gaped” open-mouthed at the trap into which they had been led, and then there was a great roar of laughter, in which no one more heartily joined than did Lady Willoughby de Broke, Lady Roberts, and Lord Roberts himself.
I recall another and grimmer instance of Lord Roberts’ sense of humour. On February 27, 1914, he introduced to the Prime Minister a Deputation whose object was to plead the cause of National Service. When I say that it was a great occasion I am not expressing my own opinion, but that of a distinguished member of the Deputation who has since written and published in pamphlet form an official account of the proceedings.
“Those of us who look forward,” he writes, “to an early fruition of the hopes which we have cherished and the aims for which we have worked for so many years past, will ever look back upon Friday, the 27th of February, 1914, as a milestone, a red-letter day in the History of National Service.
“All the circumstances conspired to stamp a great occasion with the greatness which belonged to it. The importance of the Cause needs no illustration from the present writer. In Lord Roberts’ well-known words, ‘National Service means not only national safety; it means national health, national strength, national honour, and national prosperity.’
“The Deputation included some of the greatest and most distinguished men of the day, and—a most significant and important factor—the greatness was in nearly every case not inherited but achieved by conspicuous service in the fields of national and imperial endeavour. Three Field-Marshals, including our veteran leader who has carried our flag to victory with honour in Asia and Africa and served King and country for fifty-five years; two Admirals of the Fleet, one of whom was in command of the International Forces at Crete, and the other commanded the International Naval Forces in China at the time of the Boxer Rebellion; an ex-Viceroy of India, prominent representatives of the Church and of Nonconformity; the editor of one of the most influential weeklies, and representatives of literature, science, and industry.”
Of this Deputation I was, by Lord Roberts’ personal invitation and wish, a member, and as I arrived in good time I had an opportunity of some conversation with him in the ante-room before we passed into the Library in which Mr. Asquith was to receive us.
Seeing that one of his hands was swathed in bandages, I inquired the reason.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” he said smilingly. “I’ve often been accused of having too many irons in the fire, but this time it is a case of having a hand too much in the fire. Just before leaving my hotel this morning, my foot slipped on the marble paving of the hall, and in falling forward and trying to save myself, I thrust my hand between the bars of the fire, and so got a bit of a burn. But it’s a mere nothing, and of no consequence.”
So far from being, as Lord Roberts said, a mere nothing, I have since heard that the burn was, on the contrary, excessively painful, but all through the lengthy and trying ordeal of introducing the different members of the Deputation, listening to, and commenting upon what was said, as well as listening to and replying to the Prime Minister’s very important and brilliantly able speech, Lord Roberts was the alertest, cheeriest, and most watchful of those present. A burn that would have distressed and possibly have distracted the attention of a much younger man, and that must necessarily have caused constant and severe pain, the gallant old soldier, then nearing his 82nd year, treated as of no consequence and dismissed with a lightly uttered jest. To the last it was of others, never of himself, that he thought. On this particular occasion he was pleading (to use his own words) “as plainly as an old man has the right to speak, in the face of emergencies which would be far less terrible to him personally than to generations of Britons yet unborn.” That was not many months before his death, and though I saw and talked with Field-Marshal Earl Roberts, V.C., on other and later occasions, I shall to my life’s end picture him as I saw him then—his burned and bandaged hand throbbing with pain of which he showed no single sign, thrust behind him and out of sight, as eloquently, gravely, almost passionately, he warned his hearers of a possible national disaster, the consequences of which would be “far less terrible to him personally than to generations of Britons yet unborn.”
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON
AS THE “OGRE OF THE ‘ATHENÆUM’”
It was, I believe, George Meredith who, when the author of Aylwin changed his name from Theodore Watts to Theodore Watts-Dunton, spoke of him as “Theodore What’s-his-name,” and added that he supposed his friend had made the change lest posterity might confound Watts the poet with Watts the hymn writer.
Posterity, unlike Popularity—who plays the wanton at times and cohabits with unlawful mates—keeps chaste her house from generation to generation and needs no hint from us to assist her choice. Her task is to rescue reputations from the dust, no less than to “pour forgetfulness upon the dead,” and none of us alive to-day may predict what surprise of lost or rescued reputations Posterity may have in store.
Over one of these reputations it is surely possible to imagine Posterity—I will not disrespectfully say scratching a puzzled head, but at least wrinkling in perplexity her learned brows. She will discover when straightening out her dog’s-eared literary annals that the name of one writer, who at the beginning of the last decade of the nineteenth century had a great if somewhat esoteric reputation among his brother authors, was not then to be found in any publisher’s list, and for the somewhat curious and incontinent reason that at that time he had published no book. It was not until the publication of Aylwin that the name of Theodore Watts, or as he afterwards elected to be called Watts-Dunton, became widely known outside what are sometimes not very felicitously described as “literary circles.”
To-day the tremendous issues of the Great War have, as it were, at a besom stroke of the gods, brushed into one box, to set aside, upon a shelf, all the trappings, furniture and paraphernalia of non-industrial arts and the like. Authors, artists, actors, musicians, professors, as well as the mere politician, are, and rightly, relegated to the back of the stage of life, and it is the soldier and the sailor—not by their own seeking—who bulk biggest in the public eye. But in those days of little things—the last decade of the last century—and outside the so-called “literary circle” of which I have spoken, there were other and outer circles of men and women much more keenly interested in books and authors, especially in the personality of literary celebrities, than would be possible in these days of tragic and tremendous world-issues. In such circles many curious, interesting and even romantic associations were woven around the name of Theodore Watts.
He was known to be the personal friend of Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, James Russell Lowell, Browning, and William Morris. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Meredith had in the past made their home with him at Chelsea, and Swinburne had been his house mate for many years at Putney. Rossetti and Swinburne had written and spoken of him in terms which to outsiders seem extravagant, and both had dedicated some of their best work to him. It was also known that he had lived for some time with gipsies, was one of the three greatest living authorities on gipsy lore and the gipsy language, and had been the friend of George Borrow. This curiosity was stimulated by the fact that Watts-Dunton was then very rarely seen at literary dinners or functions, and was supposed more studiously even to avoid publicity than some of his craft who might be named were supposed to seek it. Cryptic allusions in the literary journals, reviews, and magazines to a long-completed novel, deliberately and cruelly withheld from publication, and tributes to his encyclopædic knowledge, did not a little to increase this curiosity.
Thus far the reputation which Theodore Watts had attained did not altogether belie him, but there was yet another “Theodore Watts”—“Watts of the Athenæum” he was sometimes called—who had no existence except in the imagination of certain small literary fry by whom he was popularly supposed to be something of a “Hun” of the pen, a shark of the literary seas, who preyed upon suckling poets. I remember a morning in the early nineties, when I was to lunch at Putney with Watts-Dunton and Swinburne. Being in the neighbourhood of Temple Bar about eleven, I turned in for a cup of coffee and a cigarette at a famous Coffee House, then much frequented by editors, journalists, poets, rising authors and members of the literary staff of the publishing houses and newspaper offices in or around Fleet Street, as well as by members of the legal profession from the Temple and the New Law Courts.
At the next table sat a young man with long hair, a velveteen jacket and a flowing tie. He was talking so loudly to a friend, that unless one stopped one’s ears there was no choice but to overhear the conversation.
“Seen this week’s Athenæum?” he asked his friend.
“Not yet. Anything particular in it?” was the reply.
“Only a review of my poems.”
“Good?”
“Bad as it can be—bad, that is, as four contemptuous lines of small print can make it. A book, which as you know represents the thought, the passion and soul-travail of years; a book written in my heart’s blood—and dismissed by the Athenæum in four contemptuous lines!”
There was a pause too brief, if not too deep for tears. Then: “Theodore Watts, of course!” he added between set teeth. “I expected it. Everyone knows he is so insanely jealous of us younger men that he watches the publishers’ lists for every book by a young poet of ability to pounce upon it, and to cut it up. What has he done, I should like to know, to give him the right to pronounce death sentences? Why, the fellow’s never even published a book of his own.
“Shall I tell you why? He daren’t. There is a novel called Aylwin written and ready to publish many years ago. Murray has offered him a small fortune in advance royalties, I hear.”
Again the young man paused dramatically and looked darkly around the room, not apparently from fear of his being overheard, but because he wished to invite attention to the inner and exclusive knowledge which he possessed. Then, in an ecstasy of anger that had a fine disregard for so trivial a matter as a confusion of metaphors, he thundered:
“Because that viper Theodore Watts has stabbed so many of us in the back anonymously in the Athenæum, he daren’t bring out his novel. He can never say anything bad enough about a ‘minor poet,’ as he scornfully calls us, but he knows that some of us do a little reviewing, and that we are waiting for him to publish his book that we may get a bit of our own back.”
It so happened that I had in my pocket that morning a letter from Watts-Dunton deprecating the slating in the Athenæum of a book of minor poetry by a friend of mine, and I remembered a sentence in the letter. “By minor poet, meaning apparently a new and unknown poet,” which prefaced a generous if discriminating and critical appreciation of my friend’s poems.
To intrude into a conversation between strangers was, of course, as much out of the question as to make known to others, without first obtaining the writer’s permission, the contents of a letter written to myself. Otherwise I could easily have convinced the aggrieved young poet, not only that it was not Theodore Watts who had cut up his book, but that so far from being a literary Herod and a slayer of the poetic innocent, he was, as a matter of fact, Herod’s literary antithesis. As the writer of the letter and those mentioned in it are no longer with us, no harm can be done by printing part of it here:
“Like the rest of us, our Philip was mortal, and, like all of us, he could be harsh. I got Maccoll to let him review the minor bards. He was so terribly severe upon most of them that I was miserable; and I fear that I had to ask Maccoll to be chary in sending them to him, or at least I got M. to remonstrate with him for his extreme and unaccountable harshness. My sympathies, as you know, are all with the younger men. I love to see a young poet, or for the matter of that any young writer, get recognition.
“Robinson is the only fogey-brother I boom. Please tell him when you see him that if I do not write to him much, it is not because of any cooling of love. Thirty years ago he knew me for the worst correspondent in the world. The first letter he ever wrote to me (in sending me his novel No Church) I answered at the end of six months. I wish I could help it, but I can’t. My friends have to take me with all my infirmities on my head.”
“Our Philip,” I may say, was Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet; “Robinson” was F. W. Robinson, the novelist—both friends of Watts-Dunton and mine—“Maccoll” was the then editor of the Athenæum.
Had I known Watts-Dunton better (it was in the early days of our long friendship that this Coffee House incident happened), I should studiously have refrained from mentioning the matter to him. But thinking it would do no more than amuse him, I was so unwise as to tell the story over the luncheon table. Swinburne was vastly amused, and rallied his friend gleefully for being what he described as “the ogre of suckling bardlings,” but Watts-Dunton was visibly distressed, and took it so much to heart that I had cause to regret my indiscretion. He brooded over it and rumbled menacingly over it, recurring to the matter again and again, until lunch was over, vowing that it mattered nothing to him what this or that “writing fellow” thought of him as a fellow writer, but that to be credited with cruelty, and with willingness to give pain, to the younger generation, with whom he was so entirely in sympathy, was monstrous, was unthinkable, and was cause for cursing the day he had ever consented to review for the Athenæum.
Here are some extracts from another letter in which he reverts to the matter, and also incidentally gives an interesting peep of Swinburne and himself on holiday:
“The crowning mistake of my life, a life that has been full of mistakes, I fear, was in drifting into the position of literary reviewer to a journal, and not drifting out for a quarter of a century. I not only squandered my efforts, but made unconsciously a thousand enemies in the literary world whom I can never hope now to appease until death comes to my aid. Swinburne sends you his kind regards. He and I are here staying at one of the lovely places in the Isle of Wight, belonging to his aunt, Lady Mary Gordon. It is a fairy place. Her late husband’s father took one of the most romantic spots of the Undercliff and turned the shelves of debris into the loveliest Italian garden reaching down to the sea. It is so shut in from the land that it can be seen only from the sea. It puts, as I always say, Edgar Poe’s Domain of Arnheim into the shade. I know of nothing in the world so lovely. I have been writing a few sonnets, but Swinburne does nothing but bathe.”
This reference to Swinburne idling reminds me of another letter I received from Watts-Dunton, in which he pictures yet another great poet, Tennyson, hard at work and at eighty-two. The letter has no bearing on the matter immediately under discussion, but by way of contrast I venture to include it here:
Aldworth, Haslemere, Surrey,
26th Sept., ’91.My dear Kernahan,
My best thanks for your most kind letter which has been forwarded to me here where I am staying with Tennyson. When I get home I will write to suggest a day for us to meet at Putney. Tennyson, with whom I took a long walk of three miles this morning, is in marvellous health, every faculty (at 82) is as bright as it was when his years were 40. He is busy writing poetry as fine as anything he has ever written. He read out to me last night three poems which of themselves would suffice to make a poet’s fame. Really he is a miracle. This is a lovely place—I don’t know how many miles above the level of the sea—bracing to a wonderful degree.
Ever yours,
Theodore Watts.
The accepted tradition of Watts-Dunton as what Swinburne had called the ogre of the Athenæum goaded him, was a bugbear and a purgatory to him to his very life’s end.
“I see that you mention Mr. William Watson as a friend of yours,” he wrote to me. “—— who was here the other day, greatly vexed and even distressed me by telling me that Mr. Watson is under the impression that I have written disparagingly of his work. Why, it was I who at a moment, when Rossetti refused to look at any book sent to him, persuaded him to read The Prince’s Quest years ago, and got him to write to the author (for though a bad correspondent myself, I am exemplary in persuading my friends to be good ones). It was I who wrote to Fisher Unwin when he sent me Wordsworth’s Grave, urging him to reprint The Prince’s Quest.”
Not once but a score of times he spoke to me of his high admiration of some of Mr. Watson’s poems, as well as of poems by Stephen Phillips, John Davidson, Mrs. Clement Shorter, and many others of the younger poets. His championship of a certain other writer of verse who shall be nameless, involved him in a controversy which was like to end in a personal severance between himself and his correspondent.
“What you said about —— is specially amusing,” he wrote, “because on the very morning after you were here I got a letter from an acquaintance abusing me to such a degree that I am by no means sure it will not end in a personal severance. And all because I was backing up one whom he describes as the most impudent self-advertising man that has ever claimed to be a poet. According to the irate one, he has nobbled not only New Grub Street complete, but also sub-edits the —— and writes himself up there, and devotes his time to paragraphing himself in the ——! I pointed out in my answer that to me, who do not read these organs, save slightly, that the question of physical power and time presented itself and made me sceptical as to the possibility of a man who has produced many verses of late, and good ones to boot, being such a prolific rival of Mr. Pears and Mr. Colman, and as I said so in rather a chaffy way, my correspondent has taken umbrage. But oh, ‘these writing fellows!’ as Wellington used to call the knights of the ink-horn.”
I suspect that it was what Watts-Dunton calls his “chaffy way” more than his championship of the verse-maker which gave offence to his correspondent. His humour was of the old-fashioned Dickensian sort, but heavier of foot, more cumbrous of movement, occasionally somewhat grim, and rumbling, like distant thunder, over a drollery. It is possible that what he meant for playful raillery at his correspondent’s exasperation that a verse-maker should enter into a competition with Mr. Colman and Mr. Pears, by advertising his wares in the same way that they advertise mustard or soap, was taken as a seriously meant reproof. Be that as it may, for I did not hear the sequel of the controversy, Watts-Dunton, so far from being the ogre he was painted, was, on the contrary, something of a fairy godmother to many a young and struggling poet of parts. But even so he found that poets not of the first rank are hard to please.
Acknowledging the receipt of a presentation copy of verses from an acquaintance of his and mine, I chanced to inquire whether Theodore Watts was likely to review the book in the Athenæum. “God forbid!” wrote the poet in reply. “If so, he would simply make my unfortunate book the peg upon which to hang a wonderful literary robe of spun silk and fine gold. He would begin—omitting all mention of me or my book—with some generalisation, some great first principle, whether of life, literature, science or art, no one, other than himself or the God who made him, could ever be sure beforehand. In his hands it would be absorbingly fresh, learned, illuminative and fascinating. Thence he would launch out into an essay, incomparable in knowledge and in scholarship, that would deal with everything in heaven or on earth, in this world or the next, other than my unhappy little book. He would, in fact, open up so many worlds of wonder and romance, in which to lose himself, that I should think myself fortunate if, at the end of his review, I found my name as much as mentioned, and should count myself favoured were there as much as one whole line in the whole four page essay in the Athenæum about my little book.”
I am free to admit that there is much that is true in the analysis of Watts-Dunton’s method of reviewing, and that he was aware of this himself will be seen by my next quotation. It so happened that he did, much pressed though he was at the time, put his own work aside, and review the book in question in the Athenæum. He did so from the single desire to forward the interests of a young poet.
Here is part of a letter which he afterwards sent to me upon the subject. The review itself I did not see, but that it was upon the lines anticipated and failed to satisfy the poet in question is very clear.
“My method of reviewing, though it is well understood by the more famous men, does not seem to please and to satisfy the less distinguished ones; and this makes me really timid about reviewing any of them. But I believe, indeed I am sure, that my methods of using a book as an illustration of some first principle in criticism gives it more importance, attracts to it more attention than any more businesslike review article of the ordinary kind would, because my speciality is known to be that of dealing with first principles.
“I am just off again to Dursley in Gloucestershire to visit, with Swinburne, his mother and sister, who are staying there.
“I think I have satisfied myself that Shakespeare’s evident familiarity with Gloucestershire is owing to his having stayed at Dursley with one of the Shakespeares who was living there during his lifetime. The Gloucestershire names of people mentioned by him are still largely represented at Dursley and the neighbourhood, and the description of the outlook toward Berkeley is amazingly accurate.”
But Watts-Dunton had cause to regret his kindly action in departing from his almost invariable rule to review only poets of the first standing, nor was he allowed, free from irritating distractions, peacefully to pursue his researches into Shakespeare’s associations with Gloucestershire. The poet wrote again—this time to complain that the review was not sufficiently eulogistic. Watts-Dunton sent me the letter with the following comment:
“What the devil would these men have? I suppose we are all to fall at their feet as soon as they have written a few good verses and discuss them as we discuss Sophocles, Æschylus, and Sappho. Does this not corroborate what Swinburne was saying to you the other day about the modesty of the first-rate poet and the something else of the others?”
After Watts-Dunton’s return from Gloucester, I was lunching with Swinburne and himself at The Pines, and the aggrieved poet called in person while I was there. Swinburne, who hated to make a new acquaintance, and not only resolutely refused himself to every one, but, when Watts-Dunton had visitors with whom he was unacquainted, frequently betook himself to his own sanctum upstairs until they were gone, happened that morning to be in an impish mood. At any other time he would have stormed at the bare suggestion of admitting the man to the house. But on this particular morning he took a Puck-like delight in the hornets’ nest which Watts-Dunton had brought about his ears by what Swinburne held to be an undeserved honour and kindness to an undeserving and ungrateful scribbler, and he wished, or pretended to wish, that the poet be admitted. He vowed, and before heaven, that a windy encounter between the “grave and great-browed critic of the Athenæum” and the “browsing and long-eared bardling with a grievance” would be as droll as a comedy scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Watts-Dunton—outwardly smiling indulgently at his friend’s whimsical and freakish mood, but inwardly by no means regarding the matter in the light of a jest, and not a little chafed and sore—declined to see the caller then or at any other time.
“Reviewing poets other than those of the first rank,” he protested, “is the most thankless task on God’s earth. The smaller the man is intellectually, the harder, the more impossible he is to please, and the greedier he is of unstinted adulation. Strain your critical sense and your generosity to the point of comparing him to Marlowe or Marvell, and he will give you to understand that his work has more of the manner of Shelley. Compare him to Shelley, and the odds are he will grumble that it wasn’t Shakespeare, and I’m not sure that some of them would rest contented with that. I have tried to do a kindness, and I have succeeded only in making an enemy. That fellow is implacable. He will pursue me with hatred to the end of my life.”
Yet in this particular instance, as in many others, Watts-Dunton’s error had been only on the side of excessive generosity, for which Swinburne had taken him to task. Swinburne himself, it is idle to say, was a Jupiter in his judgments. He was ready to vacate his own throne and hail one poet as a god, or utterly to overwhelm another with a hurled avalanche of scorn. But at least he reserved his laudation and his worship, or else his “volcanic wrath” and thunderbolts, for his masters and his peers. He delivered judgment uninfluenced by the personal element or by kindly sentiment and easy good nature. Watts-Dunton’s good-hearted efforts to find something to praise in the work even of little men occasionally annoyed Swinburne, and drew the fire of his withering criticism upon the target of their work. It was the one and only thing upon which I knew them to differ, and in this connection I should like to add a word upon the relationship which existed between these two brothers in friendship and in song. Ideal as was that relationship, it had this drawback—that it tended to “standardize,” if I may so phrase it, their prejudices upon purely personal, as apart from critical or intellectual issues.
Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks in The Professor at the Breakfast Table of “that slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity towards each other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they sit side by side together.”
This saying has a mental as well as a physical application. It is surprising, as I have elsewhere said, how entirely Watts-Dunton’s individuality remained uninfluenced by his close association with two men of such strongly-marked and extraordinary individuality as Rossetti and Swinburne. One reservation must, however, be made. On certain personal matters the plumb of Watts-Dunton’s judgment was apt slightly to be deflected out of line by Swinburne’s denunciation. If Swinburne thundered an anathema against some one who had provoked his wrath, Watts-Dunton, even if putting in a characteristically indulgent word for the offender, was inclined—if unconsciously and against his better judgment—to view the matter in the same light.
Similarly, if Watts-Dunton had some small cause of complaint—it might even be a fancied cause of complaint—and Swinburne heard of it, the latter’s attachment to his friend caused him so to trumpet his anger as to magnify the matter to undue importance in Watts-Dunton’s eyes as well as in his own.
In this way and in this way only the association between Watts-Dunton and Swinburne was to the advantage of neither, as the mind of the one reacted sometimes upon the mind of the other to produce prejudice and to impair judgment. I have no thought or intention of belittling either in saying this. It is no service to the memory of a friend to picture him as a superman and superior to all human weakness. But if Watts-Dunton was not without his prejudices and literary dislike, he was as a critic the soul of honour, and would not write a line in review of the work of the man or woman concerning whom he had justly or unjustly already formed an unfavourable opinion. As a reviewer he set a standard which we should do well to maintain. He was no Puritan. To him everything in life was spiritually symbolic, and nothing was of itself common or unclean. The article in which he dealt with Sterne’s indecencies shirks nothing that needed to be said upon the subject, but says it in such a way as to recall Le Gallienne’s happy definition of purity—as the power to touch pitch while remaining undefiled—for in all Watts-Dunton’s spoken no less than in his written word, there was no single passage, no single line, which one could on that score regret. In his poems the red flambeau of passion and the white taper of purity burn side by side on one altar. His innate love of purity, his uncompromising attitude towards everything suggestive or unclean, were among his most marked characteristics as writer and as man. It is well for literature that one of the greatest critics of our day should have thus jealously guarded the honour of the mistress whom he served. As a poet, he was of the company of those who, in his own words:
Have for muse a maiden free from scar,
Who knows how beauty dies at touch of sin.
He kept unsullied the white shield of English Literature, and his influence for good is none the less lasting and real because it can never be estimated.
WHY THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON
PUBLISHED ONLY TWO BOOKS
With the exception of a few articles and poems reprinted in brochure form from encyclopædias and periodicals, Watts-Dunton in his lifetime published two books only—Aylwin and The Coming of Love. A successor to the former is in existence, and will shortly be issued by Mr. John Lane. Were Watts-Dunton still alive, the book would, I am convinced, even now be in manuscript. Part definitely with a book, that it might go to press, he would not, so long as a chance remained of holding on to it, to dovetail in a poem or a prose passage, perhaps from something penned many years ago, or to rewrite, amend, or omit whole chapters. I have seen proofs of his as bewildering in the matter of what printers call “pulling copy about” as a jigsaw puzzle. Aylwin itself represents no one period of the author’s lifetime, but all his literary life, up to the actual final passing for press.
This is true also of the new book Carniola, commenced, under the title of Balmoral, as far back as the days before Watts-Dunton left St. Ives to come to London, and, upon it, he was more or less at work up to the last. It takes its new title from the hero, who, the son of an English father and an Hungarian mother, was christened Carniola, after the Hungarian town of that name where he was born.
The story I have not read in its entirety, but I know that Watts-Dunton considered the love interest stronger even than in Aylwin, and his pictures of life more varied and painted in upon a wider canvas.
The portions I have seen strike me—remembering, as has already been said, how little Watts-Dunton’s personality and literary manner were influenced by any of the great contemporaries with whom he was intimately associated—as more Borrovian than anything else he has written.
This applies particularly to the conversations. Unlike some later novelists, who aim at crispness in conversational passages, by so “editing” what is said as to “cut” the inevitable and necessary commonplaces of conversation, and record only what is witty, epigrammatic and to the point, Watts-Dunton, like Borrow, sets all down exhaustively—the “give and take” of small talk, with all the “I saids” and “he saids” in full, and with illuminating little descriptions of the gestures and feelings of the speaker.
This gives a reality and naturalness to the dialogue, which we miss, for all their smartness, crispness, and epigram, in the work of certain more modern novelists, reading whom, one is inclined to wonder whether two ordinary mortals ever did, in real life, rattle off, impromptu, quite so many brilliant repartees, and clever epigrams, in so short a time.
Very Borrovian too are the open-air and nature-loving passages of Carniola, and the gypsy scenes of which there are many. Readers of Aylwin will be interested to meet with a gypsy girl, Klari, drawn from real life, who, in Watts-Dunton’s opinion, is more beautiful and more attractive than Sinfi Lovell of Aylwin and The Coming of Love. Those who had any personal knowledge, or have read the books, of one of the most fascinating and romantic figures and fine scholars of his time, the late Francis Hinde Groome, will find him drawn—Watts-Dunton believed faithfully—in the character of Stormont.
Another striking piece of characterisation is the wheelwright, Martin, whose “religiosity”—not to be confounded with the sincerity and unselfishness of a truly religious man or woman—is narrow, self-seeking, cruel, and Calvinistic.
“Make a success—and run away from it!” said a great and experienced publisher to me one day. Watts-Dunton made a great success with Aylwin. It will be interesting to see whether by following Aylwin with a second novel of Bohemian life—the character on which he has lavished most care is that of an Hungarian gypsy, a Punch and Judy showman, and the scene is laid partly in England and partly in Hungary—Watts-Dunton will prove the publisher to be, in this case at least, wrong.
The rest of Watts-Dunton’s contributions to literature must be sought for in back numbers of the reviews, magazines and critical journals, and as Introductory Studies and Essays prefixed to reprints. That a man of his enormous and many-sided knowledge should apply himself to the craft of letters practically from early manhood to extreme old age, and leave only two published volumes behind him, establishes surely a record in these days of over-publication. One cannot wonder that his readers and admirers should ask that he be more adequately represented on their bookshelves by the collection, into permanent volume form, of his many incomparable articles and essays. Until that is done, I may perhaps be permitted to point out that in a sense such a work already exists. The literary harvest of Watts-Dunton’s life has been reaped, winnowed, and garnered into one volume which, indeed, is not only a volume but a Watts-Dunton library in itself.
I refer of course to Mr. James Douglas’s Theodore Watts-Dunton, Poet, Novelist and Critic, a work which with all its faults, and it has many, is of remarkable interest. I do not say this because Mr. Douglas has told us everything that can be told, and much that it was unnecessary to tell about the life and work, the memorable friendships and the literary methods of the author of Aylwin, but because Mr. Douglas has with infinite care and pains harvested, sifted, winnowed, and gleaned the whole field of Watts-Dunton’s literary labours. The portion of the book in which the fine gold of his writings upon Wonder as the primal Element in all religion; upon the first awakenings in the soul of man of a sense of Wonder, or perhaps I should say upon the awakening, the birth, of a soul in man by means of Wonder; the noble exposition of the Psalms, the Prayer Book, and of the Bible in its relation to the soul and to the Universe; the analysis of Humour; the portions that deal with Nature and Nature-Worship; with the methods and Art of great writers in poetry and prose, and with First Principles generally—these in themselves and by themselves make Mr. Douglas’s book unique.
I am not sure, indeed, that it will not eventually do more for Watts-Dunton’s reputation as a thinker than the publication of a whole library of his collected writings. For in his contributions to the periodical Press, Watts-Dunton is apt sometimes to be diffuse. He becomes befogged, as it were, with the multitudinousness of his own learning. His “cogitations”—the word is more applicable to most of his work than “essays”—were so prodigious, branched out into such innumerable but always fascinating and pregnant side issues, as to bewilder the ordinary reader. In Mr. Douglas’s book with such judgment are the passages selected, that we get the best of Watts-Dunton in a comparatively small compass, clarified, condensed, and presented with cameo clearness. It contains, I admit, not a little with which I would willingly away. I tire sometimes of gypsies and gorgios and Sinfi Lovell, as I tire of the recurrence of the double-syllabled feminine rhyming of “glory” and “story,” “hoary” and “promontory,” in some of the sonnets.
Mr. Douglas quotes Rossetti as affirming of Watts-Dunton that he was the one man of his time who with immense literary equipment was without literary ambition. This may be true of the Theodore Watts of Rossetti’s time. It is not altogether true of the Watts-Dunton whom I knew during the last quarter of a century.
The extraordinary success of Aylwin, published, be it remembered—though some of us had been privileged to see it long before—in 1898, when the author was 66, bewildered and staggered Watts-Dunton, but the literary ambitions which that success aroused came too late in life to be realised. Though a prodigious and untiring worker, he was unsystematic and a dreamer. The books that he intended to write would have outnumbered the unwritten volumes of Robert Louis Stevenson. Had Stevenson lived longer, his dream-books would one day have materialised into manuscript and finally into paper and print. He was one of those whom Jean Paul Richter had in mind when he said: “There shall come a time when man shall awaken from his lofty dreams and find—his dreams still there, and that nothing has gone save his sleep.” Stevenson worked by impulse. His talk and his letters—like too plenteously-charged goblets, which brim over and run to waste—were full of stories he was set upon writing, but from which on the morrow he turned aside to follow some literary Lorelei whose lurings more accorded with the mood of the moment.
“I shall have another portfolio paper so soon as I am done with this story that has played me out,” he wrote to Sir Sidney Colvin in January, 1875. “The story is to be called When the Devil was Well. Scene, Italy, Renaissance; colour, purely imaginary of course, my own unregenerate idea of what Italy then was. O, when shall I find the story of my dreams, that shall never halt nor wander one step aside, but go ever before its face and ever swifter and louder until the pit receives its roaring?”
But Stevenson worked of set purpose, and, for the most part, sooner or later in another mood, went rainbow-chasing again, hoping to find—like the pot of gold which children believe lies hidden where the rainbow ends—his broken fragments of a dream that he might recover and weave them into story form.
Sometimes he succeeded; sometimes he found that the vision had wholly faded, or that the mood to interpret it had gone, and so more often he failed. But Watts-Dunton was content only to dream and, alas, to procrastinate, at least in the matter of screwing himself up to the preparation of a book. In that respect he was the despair even of his dearest friends.
Francis Hinde Groome wrote to me as far back as January, 1896:
“Watts, I hope, has not definitely abandoned the idea of a Life of Rossetti, or he might, he suggests, weave his reminiscences of him into his own reminiscences. But I doubt. The only way, I believe, would be for some one regularly day after day to engage him in talk for a couple of hours and for a shorthand writer to be present to take it down. If I had the leisure I would try and incite him thereto myself.”
I agree with Groome that that was the only way out of the difficulty. Left to himself, I doubt whether Watts-Dunton would ever have permitted even Aylwin, ready for publication as it was, to see the light. Of the influences which were brought to bear to persuade him ultimately to take the plunge, and by whom exerted, no less than of the reasons why the book was so long withheld, I shall not here write. Mr. Douglas says nothing of either matter in his book, and the presumption is that he was silent by Watts-Dunton’s own wish. This, however, I may add, that were the reasons for withholding the book so long fully known, they would afford yet another striking proof of the chivalrous loyalty of Watts-Dunton’s friendship. One reason—it is possible that even Mr. Douglas is not aware of it, for it dates back to a time when he did not know Watts-Dunton, and I have reason to believe that the author of Aylwin spoke of it only at the time, and then only to a few intimates, nearly all of whom are now dead—I very much regret I do not feel free to make known. It would afford an unexampled instance of Watts-Dunton’s readiness to sacrifice his own interests and inclinations, in order to assist a friend—in this case not a famous, but a poor and struggling one.
If his unwillingness to see his own name on the back of a book was a despair to his friends, it must have been even more so to some half-dozen publishers who might be mentioned. The enterprising publisher who went to him with some literary project, Watts-Dunton “received,” in the words of the late Mr. Harry Fragson’s amusing song, “most politely.” At first he hummed and haw’d and rumpled his hair protesting that he had not the time at his disposal to warrant him in accepting a commission to write a book. But if the proposed book were one that he could write, that he ought to write, he became sympathetically responsive and finally glowed, like fanned tinder, touched by a match, under the kindling of the publisher’s pleading. “Yes,” he would say. “I cannot deny that I could write such a book. Such a book, I do not mind saying in confidence, has long been in my mind, and in the mind of friends who have repeatedly urged me to such work.” The fact is that Watts-Dunton was gratified by the request and did not disguise his pleasure, for with all his vast learning and acute intellect there was a singular and childlike simplicity about him that was very lovable. Actually accept a commission to write the book in question he would not, but he was not unwilling to hear the proposed terms, and in fact seemed so attracted by, and so interested in, the project that the pleased publisher would leave, conscious of having done a good morning’s work, and of having been the first to propose, and so practically to bespeak, a book that was already almost as good as written, already almost as good as published, already almost as good as an assured success. Perhaps he chuckled at the thought of the march he had stolen on his fellow publishers, who would envy him the inclusion of such a book in his list. Possibly, even, he turned in somewhere to lunch, and, as the slang phrase goes, “did himself well” on the strength of it.
But whatever the publisher’s subsequent doings, the chances were that Watts-Dunton went back to his library, to brood over the idea, very likely to write to some of us whose advice he valued, or more likely still to telegraph, proposing a meeting to discuss the project (I had not a few such letters and telegrams from him myself); perhaps in imagination to see the book written and published; but ultimately and inevitably—to procrastinate and in the end to let the proposal lapse. Like the good intentions with which, according to the proverb, the road to perdition is paved, Watts-Dunton’s book-writing intentions, if intentions counted, would in themselves go far to furnish a fat corner of the British Museum Library. That he never carried these intentions into effect is due to other reasons than procrastination.
It is only fair to him to remember that his life-work, his magnum opus, must be looked for not in literature but in friendship. Stevenson’s life-work was his art. “I sleep upon my art for a pillow,” he wrote to W. E. Henley. “I waken in my art; I am unready for death because I hate to leave it. I love my wife, I do not know how much, nor can, nor shall, unless I lost her; but while I can conceive of being widowed, I refuse the offering of life without my art; I am not but in my art; it is me; I am the body of it merely.”
Watts-Dunton’s life-work, I repeat, was not literature nor poetry, but friendship. Stevenson sacrificed himself in nothing for his friends. On the contrary, he looked to them to sacrifice something of time and interest and energy on his behalf. Watts-Dunton’s whole life was one long self-sacrifice—I had almost written one fatal self-sacrifice—of his own interests, his own fame, in the cause of his friends. His best books stand upon our shelves in every part of the English-speaking world, but the name that appears upon the cover is not that of Theodore Watts-Dunton, but of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. He wrote no Life of either, but how much of their life and of their life’s best work we owe to Watts-Dunton we shall never know. Their death was a cruel blow to him; but, had he died first, the loss to Rossetti and to Swinburne would have been terrible and irreparable. Just as, to Stevenson, life seemed almost unimaginable without his art, so I find it hard, almost impossible, to picture Swinburne’s life at The Pines, failing the sustaining and brotherly presence of Watts-Dunton. Often, when Watts-Dunton was ailing, I have come away from there with a sinking at my heart lest it should be Watts-Dunton who died first, and I can well believe that, long ago, a like dread sometimes possessed those who loved Rossetti. Cheerfully and uncomplainingly, Watts-Dunton gave his own life and his own life’s work for them, and his best book is the volume of his devotion to his friends.
The sum of that devotion will never fully be known, but it was as much at the service of the unknown, or those who were only little known among us, as of the famous. He had his enemies—“the hated of New Grub Street” was his playful description of himself—and some of them have not hesitated to hint that he attached himself barnacle-wise or parasite-wise to greater men than himself for self-seeking reasons. Borne thither on their backs—it was sometimes said—he was able to sun himself upon Parnassian heights, otherwise unattainable; and being in their company, and of their company, he hoped thus to attract to himself a little of their reflected glory. The truth is that it was not their abilities nor their fame which drew Watts-Dunton to Rossetti and to Swinburne, but his love of the men themselves, and his own genius for friendship. Being the men they were, he would first have been drawn to them, and thereafter have come to love them just as wholly and devotedly had they to the end of their lives remained obscure.
So far from seeking the company or the friendship of the great, he delighted in making friends in humble ranks of life.
Anyone who has accompanied Watts-Dunton on a morning walk will remember a call here at a cottage, a shop, or it may be an inn where lived some enthusiastic but poor lover of books, birds or children, and the glad and friendly greetings that were exchanged. If, as occasionally happened, some great person—great in a social sense, I mean—happened to be a caller at The Pines, when perhaps a struggling young author, painter, or musician, in whom Watts-Dunton was interested or was trying to help, happened to be there, one might be sure that, of the two, it would not be the great man who would be accorded the warmer greeting by Watts-Dunton and—after his marriage—by his gracious, beautiful and accomplished young wife. What he once said of Tennyson is equally true of Watts-Dunton himself. “When I first knew Tennyson,” he said, “I was, if possible, a more obscure literary man than I now am, and he treated me with exactly the same manly respect that he treated the most illustrious people.” Watts-Dunton who, in his poems and in his conversation, could condense into a sentence what many of us could not as felicitously convey in a page, puts the whole matter into two words, “manly respect.” Unless he had good cause to do otherwise, he, no less than Tennyson, was prepared to treat others with “manly respect,” irrespective of fame, riches, or rank. That is the attitude neither entirely of the aristocrat nor of the democrat, but of the gentleman to whom what we call “snobbishness” is impossible.
One more reason why Watts-Dunton’s contribution to “Letters” in the publishers’ lists runs to no greater extent than two volumes, is that so many of his contributions to “Letters” took the form of epistles to his friends. The writing of original, characteristic and charming letters—brilliant by reason of vivid descriptive passages, valuable because used as a means of expressing criticism or conveying knowledge—is an art now so little practised as likely soon to be lost.
Watts-Dunton’s letter writing was possibly the outcome of his habit of procrastination. To put off the settling down in dead earnest to some work which he felt ought to be done, but at which he “shied,” he would suddenly remember a letter which he thought should be penned. “I must write So-and-so a line first,” he would say, which line, when it came to be written, proved to be an essay in miniature, in which he had—carelessly, and free from the irking consciousness that he was writing for publication and so must mind his words—thrown off some of his weightiest and wisest thoughts. He protested throughout his life that he was a wickedly bad correspondent. None the less he wrote so many charming and characteristic letters that, could they—and why not?—be collected, they would add yet another to the other reputations he attained.
Swinburne, in recent years at least, did not share his friend’s predilection for letter writing. The author of Atalanta in Calydon once said to me, almost bitterly, that had he in early and middle life refrained from writing and from answering unnecessary letters—unnecessary in the sense that there was no direct call or claim upon him to write or to answer them—there would be at least twelve more volumes by him, and of his best, in the publishers’ lists. One letter which arrived when I was a guest at The Pines led Swinburne to expound his theory of letter answering. It was from a young woman personally unknown to him, and began by saying that a great kindness he had once done to her father emboldened her to ask a favour to herself—what it was I now forget, but it necessitated a somewhat lengthy reply.
“The fact that I have been at some pains to serve the father, so far from excusing a further claim by the daughter, is the very reason why, by any decent member of that family, I should not again be assailed,” Swinburne expostulated.
“She says,” he went on, “that she trusts I won’t think she is asking too much, in hoping that I will answer her letter—a letter which does not interest me, nor concern me in the least. She could have got the information, for which she asks, elsewhere with very little trouble to herself and none to me. The exasperating thing about such letters,” he continued, getting more and more angry, “is this. I feel that the letter is an unwarrantable intrusion. Out of consideration to her father I can’t very well say so, as one does not wish to seem churlish. But, in any sense, to answer her letter, necessitates writing at length, thus wasting much precious time, to say nothing of the chance of being dragged into further correspondence. It is one’s impotency to make such folk see things reasonably which irritates. I have to suppress that irritation, and that results in further irritation. I am irritated with myself for being irritated, for not taking things philosophically as Watts-Dunton does, as well as irritated with her, and the result is the spoiling of a morning’s work. She will say perhaps, and you may even say, ‘It is only one letter you are asked to write.’ Quite so. Not much, perhaps, to make a fuss about. But” (he pounded the table with clenched fist angrily) “multiply that one person by the many who so write, and the net total works out to an appalling waste of time.”
My reply was to remind him of N. P. Willis’s protest that to ask a busy author to write an unnecessary letter was like asking a postman to go for a ten miles’ walk—to which I added, “when he has taken his boots off.” Swinburne had never heard the saying, and, with characteristic veering of the weather-vane of his mood, forgot alike his letter-writing lady and his own irritation, in his delight at a fellow sufferer’s happy hit.
“Capital!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands together gleefully. “Capital! The worm has turned, and shows that, worm as he is, he is not without a sting in his tail!”
In his later years Swinburne wrote few letters except to a relative, a very intimate friend, or upon some pressing business. The uninvited correspondent he rarely answered at all. For every letter that Swinburne received, Watts-Dunton probably received six, and sooner or later he answered all. The amount of time that went in letters, which in no way concerned his own work, or his own interests, and were penned only out of kindness of heart, was appalling. Had he refrained from writing letters intended to hearten or to help some friend or some young writer, or to soften a disappointment, the books that are lost to us—a Life of Rossetti, for instance—might well be to the good. If a book by a friend happened to be badly slated in a critical journal—and no calamity to a friend is borne with more resignation and even cheerfulness by some of us who “write” than a bad review of a friend’s book—Watts-Dunton, if he chanced to see the slating, would put work aside, and sit down then and there to indite to that friend a letter which helped and heartened him or her much more than the slating had depressed. I have myself had letters from fellow authors who told me they were moved to express sympathy or indignation about this or that bad review of one of my little books—the only effect of their letter being to rub salt into the wound, and to make one feel how widely one’s literary nakedness or even literary sinning had been proclaimed in the market place. Watts-Dunton’s letters not only made one feel that the review in question mattered nothing, but he would at the same time find something to say about the merits of the work under review, which not only took the gall out of the unfriendly critic’s ink, but had the effect of setting one newly at work, cheered, relieved, and nerved to fresh effort.
I do not quote here any of these letters, as they are concerned only with my own small writings, and so would be of no interest to the reader. Instead, let me quote one I received from him on another subject. A sister of mine sent me a sonnet in memory of a dead poet, a friend of Watts-Dunton’s and mine, and, having occasion to write to him on another matter, I enclosed it without comment. Almost by return of post came the following note, in which he was at the pains, unasked, to give a young writer the benefit of his weighty criticism and encouragement:
“My thanks for sending me your sister’s lovely sonnet. I had no idea that she was a genuine poet. It is only in the seventh line where I see an opening for improvement.
To a great/darkness and/in a/great light.
It is an error to suppose that when the old scansion by quantity gave place to scansion by accent, the quantitative demands upon a verse became abrogated. A great deal of attention to quantity is apparent in every first-rate line—
The sleepless soul that perished in its prime,
where by making the accent and the quantity meet (and quantity, I need not remind you, is a matter of consonants quite as much as of vowels) all the strength that can be got into an iambic English verse is fixed there. Although, of course, it would make a passage monotonous if in every instance quantity and accent were made to meet, those who aim at the best versification give great attention to it.”
This is one instance only out of many of his interest in a young writer who was then personally unknown to him; but in turning over for the purpose of this article those letters of his, which I have preserved, I have found so many similar reminders of his great-heartedness that I am moved once again to apply to Theodore Watts-Dunton the words in which many years ago I dedicated a book to him. They are from James Payn’s Literary Recollections. “My experience of men of letters is that for kindness of heart they have no equal. I contrast their behaviour to the young and struggling, with the harshness of the Lawyer, the hardness of the Man of Business, the contempt of the Man of the World, and am proud to belong to their calling.”
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON
AS AN AMATEUR IN AUTHORSHIP AND
AS A GOOD FELLOW
TWO SIDES OF HIS MANY-SIDEDNESS
The one thing of all others upon which Watts-Dunton set store was good-fellowship, which he counted as of greater worth even than genius. If ever he went critically astray, if ever intellectually he overrated his man, it was because he allowed his heart to outride his head. Once convince him that this or that young writer was a good fellow, and, born critic though he was, even criticism went by the board in Watts-Dunton’s intellectual estimate. If I illustrate this by a personal experience it is not to speak of myself, but because, though I have personal knowledge of many similar instances, in this instance I have the “documents” in the case before me. It concerns the circumstances by which I first came to know Watts-Dunton.
In the New Year of 1885 there appeared the first number of a weekly (afterwards a monthly) magazine with the somewhat infelicitous if not feeble title of Home Chimes. It was edited and owned by F. W. Robinson, then a popular novelist. To the first number Swinburne and Theodore Watts contributed poems, and in that now dead and forgotten venture the early work of many men and women who thereafter became famous is to be found. For instance, Jerome K. Jerome’s Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow as well as his Three Men in a Boat first saw the light there. There, much of Sir James Barrie’s early work appeared, for I once heard the author of A Window in Thrums say, though I do not suppose he meant to be taken too seriously, that there was a time when to him “London” meant the place where Home Chimes was published. There, early work by Eden Phillpotts, Israel Zangwill, G. B. Burgin, and a host of others who have since “come into their own” was printed, and there, I may say incidentally, part of my own first little book appeared.
“Yes,” Robinson once said to me reminiscently, “it is true that Jerome, Barrie, Phillpotts, Zangwill, Burgin and yourself all more or less ‘came out’ in Home Chimes, but I have my doubts sometimes whether the whole of you ever raised the sale of the magazine by so much as a number.”
“On the contrary,” I replied, “my own opinion is that, between us, we killed it.”
Be that as it may, Robinson lost heavily upon Home Chimes and was hit even harder by the death of the “three-decker”—I mean by the ousting of novels in three volumes at thirty shillings in favour of novels in one volume at six shillings. The change, indeed, caused such a drop in his income that he decided to look about him for another means of livelihood outside literature, and when, soon after, an Inspectorship of H.M. Prisons became vacant, he decided to apply for the appointment. For this he had special qualifications, as he had for years closely and critically studied our Prison System and had, in fact, written and published much upon the subject. Knowing how eager he was, for pecuniary reasons, to secure the appointment, and being anxious to do what I could to assist his candidature (I plead guilty to “log-rolling” in this most justifiable instance), I asked the late Mr. Passmore Edwards, proprietor and editor of the Echo, the only halfpenny evening paper in those days, to let me write a sketch of Robinson in the “Echo Portrait Gallery” to which I was a contributor. In this sketch—it was signed “C. K.” merely—I touched, purposely, upon Robinson’s close study and special knowledge of the workings and defects of our Prison System. My article was seen by Theodore Watts, who wrote Robinson a letter which the latter sent on to me. It was as follows:
My dear Robinson,
I have been delighted by a notice of you in the Echo, which I am told is by Coulson Kernahan. That must be a charming fellow who wrote it. Why don’t you collect your loyal supporters around you (there are only two of us, Kernahan and Watts) over a little dinner at your Club?
Yours ever,
Theodore Watts.
“Robinson, if you had not been the most modest and delicate-minded man in contemporary literature, you would have trebled your fame and trebled your income. That is what C. K. says of you, but I have said it for a quarter of a century.”
This was the beginning of my long friendship with Watts-Dunton, and I enter thus fully into a merely trivial and personal matter for the reason that the letter I have quoted is very characteristic of the writer. “Good fellowship” was, I repeat, the first article in Watts-Dunton’s creed. His very religion was based upon it. He once said to me that were it not that some good men and women would see irreverence where he meant none, and of which he was by temperament and by his very sense of wonder incapable, he should like to write an article “The Good-fellowship of God,” taking as his text the lines of Omar Khayyám, in which the old tent-maker speaks of those who picture a “surly” God:
“And daub His Visage with the Smoke of Hell;
They talk of some strict testing of us—Pish!
He’s a Good Fellow and ’twill all be well.
“To word it thus may sound profanely to some ears,” commented Watts-Dunton, “but old Khayyám was only trying to express in his pagan way—though I suspect there is as much of FitzGerald as of Omar in the rendering—his belief in the loving Fatherhood of God which is held by every Christian. In fact ‘good-fellowship’ stands to Shakespeare’s ‘cakes-and-ale’-loving, and jolly fraternity, for the ‘Human Brotherhood’ of which the stricter church and chapel going folk speak, and I suspect that there is sometimes less acrimony and a broader human outlook over cakes and ale in an inn than there is over urn-stewed tea, bread and butter and buns in some of the Church or Chapel Tea-meetings that went on when I was a boy.”
My article about Robinson was merely an attempt to set out his qualifications for the post of Inspector of Prisons. Those qualifications were many and my space was limited. Hence the article was as dull and stodgy a recital of facts as ever was written. There was as much in it from which to infer that the writer was a “charming fellow” as there is in a rice pudding by which to prove that the cook can sing divinely. But Robinson was a “good fellow.” My article, among other things, made that at least clear. According to the gospel of good-fellowship as held by Watts-Dunton, a good fellow could be appreciated only by a good fellow, just as he once wrote to me, “My theory always is that a winsome style in prose comes from a man whose heart is good.” I had shown appreciation of his friend, and, partisan and hero of friendship that he was, he was willing to take the rest on trust. Rightly to appreciate his friend was to win Watts-Dunton’s heart at the start.
One sometimes hears or sees it stated that Watts-Dunton was indifferent alike to literary fame and to criticism, adverse or favourable. No one who knew him other than very slightly could think thus. Watts-Dunton was, in scriptural phrase, “a man in whom was no guile.” He was transparently ingenuous of thought and purpose and did not attempt to conceal his gratification at the success of Aylwin or the pleasure which a discriminating and sympathetic appreciation afforded him. This only added to the respect and affection of his friends. It would have wounded us to think that the man we bore intellectually in such profound reverence, personally in such deep affection, could play the poseur and affect to despise the deserved success and recognition which his work had won. W. E. Henley is said to have thanked God that he had “never suffered the indignity of a popular success.” Henley deserved success, popular or otherwise, if ever writer did, for he never stooped to do less than his best, nor sought to achieve by shoddy means the success which thus attained is indeed to be despised. But a success deservedly won, even if a so-called popular success, every writer in his heart desires. To pretend otherwise is mere insincerity. It is not “playing the game,” for even the pursuit of Letters is none the worse for a touch of the English sporting spirit. It is indeed the chief reproach of those of us who follow the craft of Letters that we are “artists” rather than sportsmen. Englishmen fight the better and write the better for seeing alike in writing and in fighting something of a “game.”[A] Literature is a race in which every competitor hopes, and rightly, to come in first. If he be fairly beaten on his merits, he will admit and ungrudgingly, if a sportsman as well as a writer, that the better man has won. This does not mean he is content tamely to sit down under defeat. It means, on the contrary, harder work and severer training, so that on other occasions, by redoubling his exertions, he himself may be the man who wins on his merits. And if he fail again and yet again, instead of sneering at the prize as worthless, he will, if he ever heard it, recall the story of the two artists. A very young painter, who afterwards became great, stood in his obscure and struggling days, when no one had heard his name or would look at his pictures, before the greatest canvas of the greatest painter of the time. The grandeur of the work, alike in conception and in execution, staggered him. Possibly there was despair at his heart as he asked himself how could he, too poor for proper opportunity of study, too poor even to afford a model, or to buy oils, ever hope to emulate such a masterpiece as this. But at least there was at his heart no meanness, no envy, no disposition to belittle or to grudge the other his high place. Throwing back his head, with flashing eyes and a throb in his voice he exclaimed proudly, radiantly, “And I, too, am an artist!”
[A] This was penned before the war.
But when Henley, who strained and strained splendidly to carry off the first prize—and missed—belittles its value, and would have us to believe that he is better pleased to carry off “the last event”—the “Consolation Prize”—of “never having suffered the indignity of a popular success,” we distrust his sportsmanship and his sincerity. Watts-Dunton never posed after that manner. He was glad of his success and proud of it. It was because success, instead of increasing his literary stature in his own eyes as not infrequently happens, only made him increasingly modest and diffident, that he was sometimes supposed to care nothing for his literary laurels. In one respect his success was something of a disappointment to him, not so much because it illustrated the truth of Goethe’s saying—nearer seventy than sixty as Watts-Dunton was when he achieved that success—“the wished-for comes too late,” but because it was not the success he expected and to which he believed himself most to be entitled.
Mr. Douglas calls his book on Watts-Dunton Theodore Watts-Dunton, Poet, Novelist, and Critic, and the description and the order in which those descriptions appear were of Watts-Dunton’s own choosing. It was first as a poet, secondly as a novelist, and only thirdly, if at all, as a critic, that he wished and hoped to be remembered, whereas those who held the balance of values in letters were inclined to reverse that order and to place the critic first and the poet last.
Watts-Dunton was—I would emphasise this point strongly—an amateur in letters to the last, never the professional “literary man.” It is because he was by temperament the amateur, not the professional, that he took his success so seriously and did not conceal a certain almost childlike gratification (which was not vanity) that it afforded him. Your shrewd professional writer would have spent less time in contemplation of his success, and more in seeking how best to exploit and advertise that success to his professional advantage.
Watts-Dunton, on the contrary, took the success of Aylwin very much as a young mother takes her firstling. He dandled it, toyed with it, hugged it, not altogether without something of the wonder and the awe with which a fond mother regards her firstborn. An amateur, as I say, and to the last he could hardly believe his own ears, his own eyes, at finding that his work had a high “market” value, and that one publisher was ready to bid against another for his next book. Truth to tell he was not a little flustered by it all. “Hostages to posterity” of his sort carried responsibilities with them, not the least of which was the expectation that he would follow up Aylwin with other books. I remember the portentous, almost troubled knitting of his brows when perhaps a little maliciously I hinted that it was no use his bringing out new editions of Aylwin, or brooding over new prefaces for new editions of the same novel. “What your public and your publishers demand from you,” I said, “is Aylwin’s successor, not new editions, but a new book.”
“Ah!” he said with deep meaning—no one could put so much into an “ah” as he—and, figuratively, collapsed.
ONE ASPECT OF THE MANY-SIDEDNESS OF
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON
I have often been asked by those who did not know Theodore Watts-Dunton what was the secret of the singular power he appeared to exercise over others and the equally singular affection in which he was held by his friends.
My answer was that Watts-Dunton’s hold upon his friends, partly personal as it was and partly intellectual, was chiefly due to his extraordinary loyalty. Of old, certain men and women were supposed to be possessed of the “evil eye.” Upon whom they looked with intent—be it man, woman, or beast—hurt was sooner or later sure to fall.
If there be anything in the superstition, one might almost believe that its opposite was true of Watts-Dunton. He looked upon others merely to befriend, and if he did not put upon them the spell, not of an evil but of a good eye, he exercised a marvellous personal power, not, as is generally the case, upon weaker intellects and less marked personalities than his own, but upon his peers; and even upon those whom in the world’s eye would be accounted greater than he. That any one man should so completely control, and even dominate, two such intellects as Swinburne and Rossetti seemed almost uncanny. I never saw Rossetti and Watts-Dunton together, for the former had been dead some years when I first met Watts-Dunton, but my early literary friendships were with members of the little circle of which Rossetti was the centre, and all agree in their testimony to the extraordinary personal power which Watts-Dunton exercised over the poet-painter. But Swinburne—and here I speak with knowledge—Watts-Dunton absolutely dominated. It was, “What does Walter say about it?” “Walter thinks, and I agree with him, that I ought to do so and so,” or, “Let us submit the matter to Watts-Dunton’s unfailing judgment.”
Here, for fear of a possible misunderstanding, let me say that, if any reader assume from what I have just written that Swinburne was something of a weakling, that reader is very much mistaken. It is true that the author of Atalanta in Calydon was a greater force in intellect and in imagination than in will power and character, but he was not in the habit of deferring to others as he deferred to Watts-Dunton, and when he chose to stand out upon some point, or in some opinion, he was very difficult to move. It was only, in fact, by Watts-Dunton that he was entirely manageable, yet there was never any effort, never even any intention on Watts-Dunton’s part to impose his own will upon his friend. I have heard his influence upon Swinburne described as hypnotic. From that point of view I entirely dissent. Watts-Dunton held his friends by virtue of his genius for friendship—“Watts is a hero of friendship,” Mr. William Michael Rossetti once said of him—and by the passionate personal loyalty of which I have never known the equal. By nature the kindest of men, shrinking from giving pain to any living creature, he could be fierce, even ferocious, to those who assailed his friends. It was, indeed, always in defence of his friends, rarely if ever in defence of himself—though he was abnormally sensitive to adverse criticism—that he entered into a quarrel and, since dead friends could not defend themselves, he constituted himself the champion of their memory or of their reputation, and even steeled himself on more than one occasion to a break with a living friend rather than endure a slight to one who was gone. “To my sorrow,” he writes in a letter, “I was driven to quarrel with a man I loved and who loved me, William Minto, because he, with no ill intentions, printed certain injurious comments upon Rossetti which he found in Bell Scott’s papers.”
It was my own misfortune, deservedly or undeservedly, to have a somewhat similar experience to that of Professor Minto; but in my case the estrangement, temporary only as it was, included Swinburne as well as Watts-Dunton. In telling the story, and for the first time here, I must not be supposed for one moment to imagine that any importance attaches or could attach to a misunderstanding between such men as Swinburne and Watts-Dunton and a scribbler of sorts like myself, but because a third great name, that of Robert Buchanan, comes into it.
It is concerned with Buchanan’s attack upon Rossetti in the famous article The Fleshly School of Poetry, which appeared anonymously (worse—pseudonymously) in the Contemporary Review. Not long after Buchanan’s death I was asked to review Mr. Henry Murray’s Robert Buchanan and other Essays in a critical journal, which I did, and Swinburne and Watts-Dunton chanced to see the article. To say that they took exception to what I said about Buchanan, would be no description of their attitude, for Swinburne not only took exception but took offence and of the direst—so much so as to make it necessary that for a season I should discontinue my visits to The Pines.
And here let me interpolate that I entirely agree with Mr. James Douglas when he says in his volume, Theodore Watts, Poet, Novelist and Critic, “It would be worse than idle to enter at this time of the day upon the painful subject of the Buchanan affair. Indeed, I have often thought it is a great pity that it is not allowed to die out.” But when in the next sentence Mr. Douglas goes on to say, “The only reason why it is still kept alive seems to be that, without discussing it, it is impossible fully to understand Rossetti’s nervous illness about which so much has been said,” I am entirely out of agreement with him, as the quotation which I make from my article will show. Since Mr. Douglas has reopened the matter—he could hardly do otherwise in telling the story of Watts-Dunton’s literary life—I have the less hesitation in reprinting part of the article in which I endeavoured to clear Buchanan of what I held, and still hold, to be a preposterous charge. I may add that I quite agree with Mr. Douglas when he says that we must remember “the extremely close intimacy which existed between these two poet friends (Rossetti and Watts-Dunton) in order to be able to forgive entirely the unexampled scourging of Buchanan in the following sonnet, if, as some writers think, Buchanan was meant.”
Mr. Douglas then quotes the sonnet The Octopus of the Golden Isles, which I do not propose here to reprint. That Buchanan was meant is now well known, and in fact Mr. Douglas himself says in the same chapter that Watts-Dunton’s definition of envy as the “literary leprosy” has often been quoted in reference to the case of Buchanan. My article on Buchanan is too long to give in its entirety, and, even omitting the passages with no direct bearing upon the misunderstanding which it caused, is lengthier than I could wish. My apology is, first, that in justice to Watts-Dunton and to Swinburne I must present their case against me ungarbled. Moreover, as the foolish bogey-story—like an unquiet ghost which still walks the world unlaid—that Buchanan was the cause of Rossetti taking to drugs, the cause even of Rossetti’s death, is still repeated, and sometimes believed, I am not sorry of another and last attempt to give the bogey its quietus. Here are the extracts from my article:
“Mr. Murray quotes evidently with appreciation Buchanan’s tribute to his ancient enemy Rossetti, I do not share Mr. Murray’s appreciation, for Buchanan’s tribute has always seemed to me more creditable to his generosity than to his judgment. He speaks of Rossetti as ‘in many respects the least carnal and most religious of modern poets.’
“Here he goes to as great an extreme as when he so savagely attacked Rossetti as ‘fleshly.’ About this attack much nonsense has been written. We have been told that it was the cause of Rossetti’s taking to chloral; and I have heard even Rossetti’s death laid at Buchanan’s door. To my thinking talk of that sort is sheer nonsense. If Rossetti took to chloral because Buchanan called his poetry ‘fleshly,’ Rossetti would sooner or later have taken to chloral, had Buchanan’s article never been written. But when Buchanan in the fulness of his remorse calls Rossetti ‘the most religious of modern poets’ he is talking equally foolishly.
“Rossetti ‘the most religious of modern poets’! Why, Rossetti’s religion was his art. To him art was in and of herself pure, sacred, and inviolate. By him the usual order of things was reversed. It was religion which was the handmaid, art the mistress, and in fact it was only in so far as religion appealed to his artistic instincts that Rossetti can be said to have had any religion at all.
“And when Buchanan sought to exalt Rossetti to a pinnacle of purity he was guilty of a like extravagance. That Rossetti’s work is always healthy not even his most enthusiastic admirers could contend. Super-sensuous and southern in the warmth of colouring nearly all his poems are. Some of them are heavy with the overpowering sweetness as of many hyacinths. The atmosphere is like that of a hothouse in which, amid all the odorous deliciousness, we gasp for a breath of the outer air again. There are passages in his work which remind us far more of the pagan temple than of the Christian cloister, passages describing sacred rites which pertain not to the worship of the Virgin, but to the worship of Venus.
“Buchanan was a man who lived heart and soul in the mood of the moment. He had a big brain which was quick to take fire, and at such times, both in his controversies and in his criticism, he was apt to express himself with an exaggeration at which in his cooler hours he would have been the first to hurl his Titanic ridicule.
“It may seem ungenerous to say so, but even his beautiful dedicatory poem to Rossetti strikes me as a lapse into false sentiment.
To An Old Enemy
I would have snatched a bay-leaf from thy brow,
Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head;
In peace and tenderness I bring thee now
A lily-flower instead.Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song,
Sweet as thy spirit may this offering be;
Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong,
And take the gift from me.“After Rossetti’s death, ten months later, Buchanan added the following lines:
Calmly, thy royal robe of Death around thee,
Thou sleepest, and weeping brethren round thee stand;
Gently they placed, ere yet God’s angel crowned thee,
My lily in thy hand.I never saw thee living, oh, my brother,
But on thy breast my lily of love now lies,
And by that token we shall know each other,
When God’s voice saith ‘Arise!’“That this is very beautiful every one will admit, but is it true to picture those who most loved Rossetti as placing Buchanan’s lily of song in his dead hand? I think not. Nor can those who know anything of the last days of Rossetti reconcile the facts with Buchanan’s imaginary picture of a sort of celestial assignation in which, by means of a lily, Rossetti and his ancient enemy and brother poet shall identify each other on the Last Day?
“I am well aware that I shall be accused of bad taste, even of brutality, in saying this; but, as Mr. Murray himself alludes to this ancient quarrel, I must protest that false sentiment is equally abhorrent—as Buchanan would have been the first to admit. Now that Buchanan has followed Rossetti where all enmities are at an end, it is right that the truth about the matter be spoken, and this unhappy assault and its not altogether happy sequel be alike forgotten.
“Robert Buchanan’s last resting-place is within sight of the sea. And rightly so. It is his own heart that Old Ocean seems most to wear away in his fretting and chafing, and the wearing away of their own heart is the most appreciable result of the warfare which such men as Buchanan wage against the world.
“That he did not fulfil his early promise, that he frittered away great gifts to little purpose, is pitifully true, but if he flung into the face of the men whom he counted hypocrites and charlatans, words which scorched like vitriol, he had, for the wounded in life’s battle, for the sinning, the suffering, and the defeated, words of helpful sympathy and an outstretched hand of practical help.
“Mr. Murray has shown Buchanan to us as he was; no hero perhaps, certainly not a saint, but a man of great heart and great brain, quick to quarrel, but as quick to own himself in the wrong; a man intensely, passionately human, with more than one man’s share of humanity’s weaknesses and of humanity’s strength, a sturdy soldier in the cause of freedom, a fierce foe, a generous friend, and a poet who, in regard to that rarest of all gifts, ‘vision,’ had scarcely an equal among his contemporaries.
“I must conclude by a serious word with Mr. Murray. Disagree with him as one may and must, one cannot but admire his fearless honesty. None the less I am of opinion that in the following passage Mr. Murray’s own pessimism has led him to do his dead friend’s memory a grievous injustice.
“‘From the broken arc we may divine the perfect round, and it is my fixed belief that, had the subtle and cruel malady which struck him down but spared him for a little longer time, he would logically have completed the evolution of so many years, and have definitely proclaimed himself as an agnostic, perhaps even as an atheist.’
“Mr. Murray’s personal knowledge of Buchanan was intimate, even brotherly; mine, though dating many years back, was comparatively slight. But I have read Buchanan’s books, and I know something of the spirit in which he lived and worked, and I am convinced that Mr. Murray is wrong. It is not always those who have come nearest to the details of a man’s daily life, who have come nearest to him in spirit, as Amy Levy knew well when she wrote those lines, To a Dead Poet, which I shall be pardoned for bringing to my readers’ remembrance:
I knew not if to laugh or weep:
They sat and talked of you—
’Twas here he sat: ’twas this he said,
’Twas that he used to do.‘Here is the book wherein he read,
The room wherein he dwelt;
And he’ (they said) ‘was such a man,
Such things he thought and felt.’
I sat and sat, I did not stir;
They talked and talked away.
I was as mute as any stone,
I had no word to say.They talked and talked; like to a stone
My heart grew in my breast—
I, who had never seen your face,
Perhaps I knew you best.“Buchanan was, as every poet is, a creature of mood, and in certain black moods he expressed himself in language that was open to an atheistic interpretation. There were times when he was confronted by the fact that, to human seeming, iniquity prospered, righteousness went to the wall, and injustice, vast and cruel, seemed to rule the world. To the Christian belief that the Cross of Christ is the only key to the terrible problem of human suffering, Buchanan was unable to subscribe, and at times he was tempted to think that the Power at the head of things must be evil, not good. It seems to me that at such times he would cry out in soul-travail, ‘No! no! anything but that! If there be a God at all He must be good. Before I would do God the injustice of believing in an evil God, I would a thousand times sooner believe in no God at all!’ Then the mood passed; the man’s hope and belief in an unseen beneficent Power returned, but the sonnet in which he had given expression to that mood remained. And because the expression of that mood was permanent, Mr. Murray forgets that it was no more than the expression of a mood, and tells us that he believes, had Buchanan lived longer, he would have become an atheist.
“Again I say that I believe Mr. Murray to be wrong. Buchanan, like his own Wandering Jew, trod many dark highways and byways of death, but he never remained—he never could have remained—in that Mortuary of the Soul, that cul-de-sac of Despair which we call Atheism.
* * * * *
“This is not the place in which to say it, but perhaps my editor will allow me to add how keenly I felt, as I stood by the graveside of Robert Buchanan in that little God’s acre by the sea, the inadequacy of our Burial Service, beautiful as it is, in the case of one who did not profess the Christian faith. To me it seemed little less than a mockery to him who has gone, as well as a torture to those who remain, that words should be said over his dead body which, living, he would have repudiated.
“Over the body of one whose voice is silenced by death, we assert the truth of doctrines which living he had unhesitatingly rejected. It is as if we would, coward-like, claim in death what was denied us in life.
“In the case of a man whose beliefs were those of Robert Buchanan, how much more seemly it would be to lay him to rest with some such words as these:
“‘To the God from Whom he came, we commend this our friend and brother in humanity, trusting that what in life he has done amiss, may in death be forgotten and forgiven; that what in life he has done well, may in death be borne in remembrance. And so from out our human love, into the peace of the Divine love, we commend him, leaving him with the God from Whom, when we in our turn come to depart whither he has gone, we hope to receive like pardon, forgiveness and peace. In God’s hands, to God’s love and mercy, we leave him.’”
Re-reading this article many years after it was written, I see nothing in it to which friendship or even affection for either Rossetti or Buchanan could reasonably object.
This was not the view taken by Swinburne and Watts-Dunton. It so happened that I encountered the latter in the Strand a morning or two later, and more in sadness than in anger he reproached me with “disloyalty to Gabriel, disloyalty to Algernon, and disloyalty to myself.”
I replied that touching Rossetti, as he did not happen to be the King, had never so much as heard of my small existence, nor had I ever set eyes upon him, to accuse me of disloyalty to him, to whom I owed no loyalty, struck me as a work of supererogation. And, as touching Swinburne and Watts-Dunton himself, honoured as I was by the high privilege of their friendship, I could not admit that that friendship committed me to a blind partisanship and to the identification of myself with their literary likings or dislikings or their personal quarrels.
My rejection of the penitential rôle, to say nothing of my refusing to take the matter seriously, seemed to surprise and to trouble Watts-Dunton. While protesting the regard of every one at The Pines for me personally, he gave me to understand that Swinburne in particular was so wounded by my championship as he called it of Buchanan, that he would have some trouble in making my peace in that quarter, and even hinted that an arrangement, by which I was either to lunch or to dine at The Pines within the next few days, had better stand over.
Naturally I replied—I could hardly do otherwise, as I did not see my way without insincerity to express regret for what I had written about Buchanan, though I did express regret that it had given offence to Swinburne and himself—that that must be as he chose, and so we parted, sadly on my side if not on his; and I neither saw nor heard from anyone at The Pines for some little time after. Then one morning came the following letter:
My dear Kernahan,
Don’t think any more of that unpleasant little affair. Of course neither Swinburne nor I expect our friends, however loyal, to take part in the literary quarrels that may be forced upon us. But this man had the character among men who knew him well of being the most thorough sweep, and to us it did seem queer to see your honoured name associated with such a man. But, after all, even he may not have been as black as his acquaintances painted him. Your loyalty to us I do not doubt.
Yours affectionately,
Theodore Watts-Dunton.
This was followed by a wire—from Swinburne—asking me to lunch, which I need hardly say I was glad to accept, and so my relationship to the inmates of The Pines returned to its old footing.
Since it was Swinburne much more than Watts-Dunton who so bitterly resented what I had written of Buchanan, I am glad to have upon my shelves a volume of Selections from Swinburne, published after his death, and edited by Watts-Dunton. The book was sent to me by the Editor, and was inscribed:
“To Coulson Kernahan,
whom Swinburne dearly loved, and who as dearly loved him.
From Theodore Watts-Dunton.”
My unhappy connection with the “Buchanan affair” had, it will be seen, passed entirely from Swinburne’s memory, and indeed the name of Robert Buchanan, who was something of a disturbing element even in death, as he had been in life, was never mentioned among us again. How entirely the, to me, distressing if brief rift in my friendship with Watts-Dunton—a friendship which I shall always count one of the dearest privileges of my life—was closed and forgotten, is clear from the following letter. It was written in reply to a telegram I sent, congratulating him on celebrating his 81st birthday—the last birthday on earth, alas, of one of the most generous and great-hearted of men:
The Pines, Putney, S.W.
Oct. 20th, 1913.My dear Kernahan,
Your telegram congratulating me upon having reached my 81st birthday affected me deeply. Ever since the beginning of our long intimacy I have had from you nothing but generosity and affection, almost unexampled, I think, between two literary men. My one chagrin is that I can get only glimpses of you of the briefest kind. Your last visit here was indeed a red-letter day. Don’t forget when occasion offers to come and see us. Your welcome will be of the most heartfelt kind.
Most affectionately yours,
Theodore Watts-Dunton
THE LAST DAYS OF THEODORE
WATTS-DUNTON
The pathetic side of the last two or three years of Watts-Dunton’s life was that he had outlived nearly every friend of youth and middle age, and, with the one or two old friends of his own generation who survived, he had lost touch. Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, William Morris, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Borrow, William Black, Dr. Gordon Hake, Westland and Philip Marston, Jowett, Louise Chandler Moulton, William Sharp, James Russell Lowell, George Meredith, were gone. Mr. William Rossetti, the only one of the old fraternity left, now rarely, he tells me, leaves his own home. In any case he and Watts-Dunton had not met for years. Mr. Edmund Gosse, once a frequent and always an honoured visitor to The Pines, was rarely if ever there during the years that I came and went.
It was between Swinburne and Mr. Gosse that the intimacy existed, though by both the inmates he was to the last held in high regard. Mr. Gosse would have the world to believe that he grows old, but no one who knows him either personally or by his writings can detect any sign of advancing years. On the contrary, both in the brilliance of his personality and of his later intellectual achievements, he appears to possess the secret of eternal youth. It was neither oncoming years nor any lessening of friendship between him and Swinburne which was responsible for Mr. Gosse’s defection, but the fact that he had added to his other duties that of Librarian to the House of Lords. This, and his many and increasing official and literary activities, kept, and keep him closely occupied, and so it was that his name gradually, insensibly, dropped out of the list of visitors at The Pines.
Mr. Thomas Hake was with Watts-Dunton to the end, and indeed it was not a little due to the help of “The Colonel” (the name by which from his boyhood Mr. Hake was known at The Pines on account of his cousinship with and his likeness to Colonel, afterwards General Charles Gordon) that Watts-Dunton accomplished so much literary work in his last decade. Some of the younger men, Mr. Clement Shorter, accompanied now and then by his poet-wife, Mr. James Douglas, Mr. Henniker-Heaton, Dr. Arthur Compton-Rickett, and Mr. F. G. Bettany, remained in touch with The Pines until Watts-Dunton’s death. I met none of them there myself, as after I went to live a long way from London my own visits were less frequent, and being a friend of older standing, with memories in common which none of the newer friends whom I have mentioned shared, it was generally arranged that I was the only guest. That there was no forgetfulness or lessening of friendship on Watts-Dunton’s part towards the friends whom he now rarely met, is evident by the following extract from a letter in reply to a question on my part whether it would be possible for him to be my guest at one of the Whitefriars’ Club weekly gatherings.
“I should look forward,” he said, “to seeing some of the truest and best friends I have in the world, including yourself, Robertson Nicoll, Richard Whiteing, and Clement Shorter. And when you tell me that F. C. Gould is a Friar (the greatest artistic humorist now living in England) I am tempted indeed to run counter to my doctor’s injunctions against dining out this winter.
“The other day I had the extreme good luck to find and buy the famous lost water-colour drawing of the dining-room at 16 Cheyne Walk, with Rossetti reading out to me the proofs of Ballads and Sonnets. I am sending photographs of it to one or two intimate friends, and I enclose you one. The portrait of Rossetti is the best that has ever been taken of him.”
Of all the friendships which Watts-Dunton formed late in life none was so prized by him as that with Sir William Robertson Nicoll. As it was I who made the two known to each other, and in doing so, removed an unfortunate and what might have been permanent misunderstanding, I may perhaps be pardoned for referring to the matter here.
The name of Sir William coming up one day in a conversation, I discovered to my surprise that Watts-Dunton was feeling sore about some disparaging remark which Sir William was supposed to have made about him. I happened to know how the misunderstanding came about, and I told Watts-Dunton the following true story, illustrating how easily such misunderstandings arise, and illustrating too the petty and “small beer” side of “literary shop” gossip. It concerned an editor and an author. The author employed a literary agent, who offered the editor one of the author’s stories. “I have set my face against the middleman in literature,” the editor replied. “If Mr. —— likes to offer me his story direct, I’ll gladly take it, and pay his usual price per thousand words, but buy it through an agent I won’t.”
This came to the ears of the author, who remarked: “That’s rather unreasonable on ——’s part. I buy, through an agent, the periodical he edits. I don’t expect him to stand in the gutter, like a newsboy, selling me his paper himself at a street corner, and I don’t see why he should object to my offering him my wares by means of an agent.”
This not unfriendly remark was overheard by some one, who told it to some one else, who repeated it to another person, that person in his turn passing it on, and so it went the round of Fleet Street and certain literary clubs. The copper coinage of petty personal gossip, unlike the pound sterling coin of the realm, becomes magnitudinally greater, instead of microscopically less, by much circulation. Instead of infinitesimal attritions, as in the case of the coin, there are multitudinous accretions, until the story as it ultimately started life, and the story as it afterwards came to be told, would hardly recognise each other, at sight, as blood relatives. By the time the innocent remark of the author came to the ears of the editor concerned, it had so grown and become so garbled, that its own father would never have known it. “Have you heard what So-and-so the author said about you?” the editor was asked. “He said that he hoped to live to see you in the gutter, selling at the street corner the very paper you now edit.” Not unnaturally the editor’s retort was uncomplimentary to the author, who, when the retort came to his ears, expressed an opinion about the editor which was concerned with other matters than the editorial objection to the middleman in literature, and so a misunderstanding (fortunately long since removed) arose in good earnest.
I should not put this chronicle of journalistic small beer—a version as it is of the famous Three Black Crows story—on record, were it not that it was exactly in the same way that an innocent remark of Sir William Robertson Nicoll’s had been misrepresented to Watts-Dunton. This I did my best to explain to the latter, but not feeling as sure as I wished to be that all soreness was removed, I asked him to lunch with me at the Savage Club, and then invited Dr. Nicoll, as he then was, to meet him. There was at first just a suspicion of an armed truce about Watts-Dunton, in whose memory the supposed attack upon himself was still smouldering, but his interest and pleasure in the conversation of a student and scholar of like attainments to his own soon dispelled the stiffness. A chance but warmly affectionate reference to Robertson Smith by Dr. Nicoll drew from Watts-Dunton that long-drawn “Ah!” which those who knew him well remember as meaning that he was following with profound attention and agreement what was being said.
“Why, I knew that man—one of the salt of the earth,” he interpolated. Then he added gravely, more reminiscently than as if addressing anyone, “I had affection for him!” Leaning over the table, his singularly brilliant and penetrating eyes full upon the other, he said almost brusquely, “Tell me what you knew of Robertson Smith!”
Dr. Nicoll responded, and within five minutes’ time the two of them were talking together, comparing notes and exchanging experiences and confidences like old friends. As we were parting, Watts-Dunton said to me:
“You are coming to lunch on Monday. I wish I could persuade our friend Nicoll here to accompany you, so that Swinburne could share the pleasure of such another meeting as we have had here to-day.”
The invitation was accepted by Dr. Nicoll with the cordiality with which it was offered, and I may add with the usual result, for the intervener. “Patch up a quarrel between two other persons—and find yourself left out in the cold,” Oscar Wilde once said to me. I had merely removed a misunderstanding, not patched up a quarrel, but the result of my bringing Watts-Dunton, Nicoll, and Swinburne together was that, on the occasion of the first meeting of all three, they had so much to talk about, and talked about it so furiously, that I had cause to ask myself whether the “two” in the proverb should not be amended to “three,” so as to read “Three’s company; four’s none.” Thereafter, and to his life’s end, Watts-Dunton could never speak too gratefully or too appreciatively of Sir William Robertson Nicoll. He came indeed to hold the latter’s judgment alike in literature and scholarship, as in other matters, in the same admiration with which Swinburne held the judgment of Watts-Dunton himself.
Thus far it is only of Watts-Dunton’s friends that I have written, reserving the last place in my list, which in this case is the first in precedence, for the only name with which it is fitting that, in my final word, his name should be coupled. I have said that the pathetic side of his later years was that he had outlived so many of the men and women he loved. To outlive one’s nearest and dearest friends must always be poignant and pathetic, but in other respects Watts-Dunton’s life was a full and a happy one, and never more so than in these later years, for it was then that the one who was more than friend, the woman he so truly loved, who as truly loved him, became his wife. In his marriage, as in his friendships, Watts-Dunton was singularly fortunate. Husband and wife entertained each for the other, and to the last, love, reverence and devotion. If to this Mrs. Watts-Dunton added exultant, even jealous pride in her husband’s intellect, his great reputation and attainments, he was even more proud of her beauty and accomplishments, and his one anxiety was that she should never know a care. When last I saw them together—married as they had then been for many years—it was evident that Watts-Dunton had lost nothing of the wonder, the awe, perhaps even the perplexity, with which from his boyhood and youth he had regarded that mystery of mysteries—womanhood. His love for her was deep, tender, worshipping and abiding, albeit it had something of the fear with which one might regard some exquisite wild bird which, of its own choice, comes to the cage, and, for love’s sake, is content to forgo its native woodland, content even to rest with closed wings within the cage, while without comes continually the call to the green field, the great hills and the glad spaces between sea and sky. Be that as it may, this marriage between a young and beautiful woman—young enough and beautiful enough to have stood for a picture of his adored Sinfi Lovell of Aylwin, whom, in her own rich gypsy type of beauty, Mrs. Watts-Dunton strangely resembled—and a poet, novelist, critic and scholar who was no longer young, no longer even middle-aged, was from first to last a happy one. It is with no little hesitation that I touch even thus briefly and reverently upon a relationship too sacred and too beautiful for further words. Even this much I should not have said were it not that, in marriages where some disparity of age exists, the union is not always as fortunate, and were it not also that I know my friend would wish that his love and gratitude to the devoted wife, who made his married years so supremely glad and beautiful, should not go unrecorded.
The last time I saw Watts-Dunton alive was shortly before his death. I had spent a long afternoon with Mrs. Watts-Dunton and himself, and at night he and I dined alone, as his wife had an engagement. In my honour he produced a bottle of his old “Tennyson” port, lamenting that he could not join me as the doctor had limited him to soda-water or barley-water. When I told him that I had recently been dining in the company of Sir Francis Carruthers Gould, and that “F. C. G.” had described soda-water as “a drink without a soul,” Watts-Dunton was much amused. But, his soulless drink notwithstanding, I have never known him talk more brilliantly. He rambled from one subject to another, not from any lack of power to concentrate or lack of memory, but because his memory was so retentive and so co-ordinating that the mention of a name touched, as it were, an electric button in his memory, which called up other associations.
And by rambling I do not mean that he was discursive or vague. No matter how wide his choice of subject, one was conscious of a sense of unity in all that Watts-Dunton said. Religion might by others, and for the sake of convenience, be divided into creeds, Philosophy into schools of thought, Science into separate headings under the names of Astronomy, Geology, Zoology, Botany, Physics, Chemistry and the like, but by him all these were considered as component parts—the one dovetailing into the other—of a perfect whole. One was conscious of no disconnection when the conversation slid from this science, that philosophy, or religion, to another, for as carried on by him, it was as if he were presenting to the observer’s eye merely different facets of the precious and single stone of truth. His was not the rambling talk of old age, for more or less rambling his talk had been ever since I had known him.
It was due partly also to his almost infinite knowledge of every subject under the sun. The mere mention of a science, of a language, of a system of philosophy, of a bird, a flower, a star, was, as it were, a text upon which he would base one of his wonderful and illuminating disquisitions. His grasp of first principles was so comprehensive that he was able in a few words to present them boldly and clearly for the hearer’s apprehension, whence he would pass on to develop some new line of thought. His interests were to the last so eager and youthful, that even comparatively unessential side-issues—as he spoke of them—suddenly opened up into new and fascinating vistas, down which the searchlight of his imagination would flash and linger, before passing on, from point to point, to the final goal of his thought.
Rossetti often said that no man that ever he met could talk with the brilliancy, beauty, knowledge, and truth of Watts-Dunton, whose very “improvisation” in conversation Rossetti described as “perfect” as a “fitted jewel.” Rossetti deplored, too, on many occasions his “lost” conversations with the author of Aylwin—lost because only by taking them down in shorthand, as spoken, could one remember the half of what was said, its incisive phrasing, its flashing metaphors and similes, and the “fundamental brain work” which lay at the back of all.
I am always glad to remember that on this, my last meeting with Watts-Dunton, he was—though evidently weakening and ailing in body—intellectually at his best. He revived old memories of Tennyson, Rossetti, Browning, Lowell, Morris, Matthew Arnold, and many another. He dwelt lovingly once again but with new insight upon the first awakening of the wonder-sense in man, and how this wonder-sense—the beginning whether in savage or in highly civilised races of every form of religion—passed on into worship. Our intercourse that evening was in fact more of a monologue, on his part, than of the usual conversation between two old friends, with interests and intimates in common. I was indeed glad that it should be so, first because Watts-Dunton, like George Meredith (whose talk, though I only heard it once, struck me if more scintillating also as more self-conscious), was a compelling and fascinating conversationalist, and secondly because his slight deafness made the usual give-and-take of conversation difficult.
Not a little of his talk that night was of his wife, his own devotion to her, and the unselfishness of her devotion to him. He spoke of Louise Chandler Moulton, “that adorable woman,” as he called her, whom Swinburne held to be the truest woman-poet that America has given us. He charged me to carry his affectionate greetings to Robertson Nicoll. “Only I wish I could see more of him,” he added. “It’s hard to see so seldom the faces one longs to see.”
And then, more faithful in memory to the dead friends of long ago than any other man or woman I have known, he spoke movingly of “our Philip,” his friend and mine, Philip Marston. Then he took down a book from a little bookshelf which hung to the right of the sofa on which he sat, and, turning the pages, asked me to read aloud Marston’s Sonnet to his dead love:
It must have been for one of us, my own,
To drink this cup and eat this bitter bread.
Had not my tears upon thy face been shed,
Thy tears had dropped on mine; if I alone
Did not walk now, thy spirit would have known
My loneliness; and did my feet not tread
This weary path and steep, thy feet had bled
For mine, and thy mouth had for mine made moan.
And so it comforts me, yea, not in vain
To think of thine eternity of sleep;
To know thine eyes are tearless though mine weep.
And when this cup’s last bitterness I drain,
One thought shall still its primal sweetness keep—
Thou hadst the peace, and I the undying pain.
His only comment on the poem was that long and deeply-breathed “Ah!” which meant that he had been profoundly interested, perhaps even profoundly stirred. Often it was his only comment when Swinburne, head erect, eyes ashine, and voice athrill, had in the past stolen into the same room—noiseless in his movements, even when excited—to chaunt to us some new and noble poem, carried like an uncooled bar of glowing iron direct from the smithy of his brain, and still intoning and vibrating with the deep bass of the hammer on the anvil, still singing the red fire-song of the furnace whence it came.
We sat in silence for a space, and then Watts-Dunton said:
“Our Philip was not a great, but at least he was a true poet, as well as a loyal friend and a right good fellow. He is almost forgotten now by the newer school, and among the many new voices, but Louise Chandler Moulton and Will Sharp, and others of us, have done what we could to keep his memory green. We loved him, as Gabriel and Algernon loved him, our beautiful blind poet-boy.”
When soon after I rose reluctantly to go, a change seemed to come over Watts-Dunton. The animation faded out of voice and face, and was replaced by something like anxiety, almost like pain.
“Must you go, dear fellow, must you go?” he asked sorrowfully. “There is a bed all ready prepared, for we’d hoped you’d stay the night.”
I explained that I was compelled to return to Hastings that evening, as I had to start on a journey early next morning. Perhaps I had let him overexert himself too much in conversation. Perhaps he had more to say and was disappointed not to be able to say it, for he seemed suddenly tired and sad. The brilliant talker was gone.
“Come again soon, dear fellow. Come again soon,” he said, as he held my hand in a long clasp. And when I had passed out of his sight and he out of mine, his voice followed me pathetically, almost brokenly into the night, “Come again soon, Kernahan. Come again soon, dear boy. Don’t let it be long before we meet again.”
It was not long before we met again, but it was, alas, when I followed to his long home one who, great as was his fame in the eyes of the world as poet, critic, novelist and thinker, is, in the hearts of some of us, who grow old, more dearly remembered as the most unselfish, most steadfast, and most loving of friends.