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.