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.