In good company

by Coulson Kernahan

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.