In good company

by Coulson Kernahan

This applies particularly to the conversations. Unlike some later novelists, who aim at crispness in conversational passages, by so “editing” what is said as to “cut” the inevitable and necessary commonplaces of conversation, and record only what is witty, epigrammatic and to the point, Watts-Dunton, like Borrow, sets all down exhaustively—the “give and take” of small talk, with all the “I saids” and “he saids” in full, and with illuminating little descriptions of the gestures and feelings of the speaker.

This gives a reality and naturalness to the dialogue, which we miss, for all their smartness, crispness, and epigram, in the work of certain more modern novelists, reading whom, one is inclined to wonder whether two ordinary mortals ever did, in real life, rattle off, impromptu, quite so many brilliant repartees, and clever epigrams, in so short a time.

Very Borrovian too are the open-air and nature-loving passages of Carniola, and the gypsy scenes of which there are many. Readers of Aylwin will be interested to meet with a gypsy girl, Klari, drawn from real life, who, in Watts-Dunton’s opinion, is more beautiful and more attractive than Sinfi Lovell of Aylwin and The Coming of Love. Those who had any personal knowledge, or have read the books, of one of the most fascinating and romantic figures and fine scholars of his time, the late Francis Hinde Groome, will find him drawn—Watts-Dunton believed faithfully—in the character of Stormont.

Another striking piece of characterisation is the wheelwright, Martin, whose “religiosity”—not to be confounded with the sincerity and unselfishness of a truly religious man or woman—is narrow, self-seeking, cruel, and Calvinistic.

“Make a success—and run away from it!” said a great and experienced publisher to me one day. Watts-Dunton made a great success with Aylwin. It will be interesting to see whether by following Aylwin with a second novel of Bohemian life—the character on which he has lavished most care is that of an Hungarian gypsy, a Punch and Judy showman, and the scene is laid partly in England and partly in Hungary—Watts-Dunton will prove the publisher to be, in this case at least, wrong.

The rest of Watts-Dunton’s contributions to literature must be sought for in back numbers of the reviews, magazines and critical journals, and as Introductory Studies and Essays prefixed to reprints. That a man of his enormous and many-sided knowledge should apply himself to the craft of letters practically from early manhood to extreme old age, and leave only two published volumes behind him, establishes surely a record in these days of over-publication. One cannot wonder that his readers and admirers should ask that he be more adequately represented on their bookshelves by the collection, into permanent volume form, of his many incomparable articles and essays. Until that is done, I may perhaps be permitted to point out that in a sense such a work already exists. The literary harvest of Watts-Dunton’s life has been reaped, winnowed, and garnered into one volume which, indeed, is not only a volume but a Watts-Dunton library in itself.

I refer of course to Mr. James Douglas’s Theodore Watts-Dunton, Poet, Novelist and Critic, a work which with all its faults, and it has many, is of remarkable interest. I do not say this because Mr. Douglas has told us everything that can be told, and much that it was unnecessary to tell about the life and work, the memorable friendships and the literary methods of the author of Aylwin, but because Mr. Douglas has with infinite care and pains harvested, sifted, winnowed, and gleaned the whole field of Watts-Dunton’s literary labours. The portion of the book in which the fine gold of his writings upon Wonder as the primal Element in all religion; upon the first awakenings in the soul of man of a sense of Wonder, or perhaps I should say upon the awakening, the birth, of a soul in man by means of Wonder; the noble exposition of the Psalms, the Prayer Book, and of the Bible in its relation to the soul and to the Universe; the analysis of Humour; the portions that deal with Nature and Nature-Worship; with the methods and Art of great writers in poetry and prose, and with First Principles generally—these in themselves and by themselves make Mr. Douglas’s book unique.

I am not sure, indeed, that it will not eventually do more for Watts-Dunton’s reputation as a thinker than the publication of a whole library of his collected writings. For in his contributions to the periodical Press, Watts-Dunton is apt sometimes to be diffuse. He becomes befogged, as it were, with the multitudinousness of his own learning. His “cogitations”—the word is more applicable to most of his work than “essays”—were so prodigious, branched out into such innumerable but always fascinating and pregnant side issues, as to bewilder the ordinary reader. In Mr. Douglas’s book with such judgment are the passages selected, that we get the best of Watts-Dunton in a comparatively small compass, clarified, condensed, and presented with cameo clearness. It contains, I admit, not a little with which I would willingly away. I tire sometimes of gypsies and gorgios and Sinfi Lovell, as I tire of the recurrence of the double-syllabled feminine rhyming of “glory” and “story,” “hoary” and “promontory,” in some of the sonnets.

Mr. Douglas quotes Rossetti as affirming of Watts-Dunton that he was the one man of his time who with immense literary equipment was without literary ambition. This may be true of the Theodore Watts of Rossetti’s time. It is not altogether true of the Watts-Dunton whom I knew during the last quarter of a century.

The extraordinary success of Aylwin, published, be it remembered—though some of us had been privileged to see it long before—in 1898, when the author was 66, bewildered and staggered Watts-Dunton, but the literary ambitions which that success aroused came too late in life to be realised. Though a prodigious and untiring worker, he was unsystematic and a dreamer. The books that he intended to write would have outnumbered the unwritten volumes of Robert Louis Stevenson. Had Stevenson lived longer, his dream-books would one day have materialised into manuscript and finally into paper and print. He was one of those whom Jean Paul Richter had in mind when he said: “There shall come a time when man shall awaken from his lofty dreams and find—his dreams still there, and that nothing has gone save his sleep.” Stevenson worked by impulse. His talk and his letters—like too plenteously-charged goblets, which brim over and run to waste—were full of stories he was set upon writing, but from which on the morrow he turned aside to follow some literary Lorelei whose lurings more accorded with the mood of the moment.