When late I attempted your pity to move
What made you so deaf to my prayers?
Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
But why did you kick me downstairs?
You remember Jeffery Prowse’s lines about someone being ‘problematically sober, but indubitably drunk’?” I went on. “The ‘dissembling’ of ‘your love’ in the opening sentences of your article may be ‘problematical,’ but the ‘kicking’ of us ‘downstairs,’ and out of the door later on, is as ‘indubitable’ as is the fact that the book is profoundly honoured by being reviewed by Algernon Charles Swinburne at all.”
With that parting shot, at which he laughed heartily, I bade him good-bye and came away, to find on returning to my home, a letter from Mr. Locker-Lampson which, as it has no word that can be considered private, and deals with matters of general literary interest, as well as with some of the strictures by Swinburne that have been quoted above, I venture to append:
Newhaven Court, Cromer,
17th Oct.Dear Kernahan,
I have just been reading the Forum for October, and I think that altogether we may be satisfied with A. C. S.’s article.
I venture to think that he rather overrates Landor and underrates Calverley.
We should not have inserted ‘Youth and Art’ [the lines by Browning referring to ‘Gibson’s hash’ to which Mr. Swinburne took such objection] or ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ or Croker’s ‘Miss Peel.’ We ought to have put in Pope’s ‘I know a thing.’
I remember talking to Tennyson about Dirce, and he said it was too classical for English taste. I do not think many people would care for it, but perhaps it might be added. Stygean Set is not a cultivated expression, not better than lot, and if Dirce was a shade it did not matter whether Charon forgot himself or not.
I really feel much obliged to Mr. Swinburne for whom I have sincere regard. Perhaps if you see him you will tell him of my obligation.
His article strengthens my decided opinion that the book is a very difficult one to edit. All the experts have different ideas about it. Lang, Swinburne, Gosse, Dobson, and Palgrave are all opposed.
I hope you are quite well.
Always truly,
F. L. L.
VI
In all my conversations with Swinburne, I cannot recall one instance of his interrupting a speaker. He would, it is true, go off at a conversational tangent, as when, talking of Francis Hinde Groome and Suffolk, he interpolated apparently irrelevant remarks upon the curious names of some Yorkshire villages, having presumably only discovered that morning that one of these villages bore the delightful name of “Beggar my Neighbour.” But, though one could see by his flashing eye that the hounds of utterance were chafing and fretting to fling themselves upon the quarry, he invariably waited till the other speaker had made an end of it before letting go the leash. To everything that Watts-Dunton said, then or at any time, he listened almost as a disciple might listen to a master, and again and again he urged me to use any influence I had with the author of Aylwin to induce him to give that then unpublished work to the world, and to allow his Athenæum essays to be collected and issued in book form.
“Only,” said Swinburne at a white heat of enthusiastic admiration, “if every page, on which they were printed, represented a hundred pound bank-note; if the back and the sides of the cover were of the finest beaten gold—that would not be too costly a raiment for the noblest critical work, dealing with first principles, that has ever been given to the world.”
That this was Swinburne’s deliberate opinion of the value of his brother poet’s and brother friend’s work, and was not the expression of a moment’s enthusiasm, I have reason to know, for he used similar expressions in my presence on many occasions. I observe, too, that Mr. James Douglas, in his book Theodore Watts-Dunton, Poet, Novelist, and Critic, quotes Swinburne as describing Watts-Dunton as “the first critic of his time, perhaps the largest minded and surest sighted of any age”—a judgment which, as Mr. Douglas reminds us, Rossetti endorsed.
Watts-Dunton, rumpling up his hair with one hand, tried to turn the conversation into other channels, but Swinburne was obdurate.