“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.