In good company

by Coulson Kernahan

“I shall have another portfolio paper so soon as I am done with this story that has played me out,” he wrote to Sir Sidney Colvin in January, 1875. “The story is to be called When the Devil was Well. Scene, Italy, Renaissance; colour, purely imaginary of course, my own unregenerate idea of what Italy then was. O, when shall I find the story of my dreams, that shall never halt nor wander one step aside, but go ever before its face and ever swifter and louder until the pit receives its roaring?”

But Stevenson worked of set purpose, and, for the most part, sooner or later in another mood, went rainbow-chasing again, hoping to find—like the pot of gold which children believe lies hidden where the rainbow ends—his broken fragments of a dream that he might recover and weave them into story form.

Sometimes he succeeded; sometimes he found that the vision had wholly faded, or that the mood to interpret it had gone, and so more often he failed. But Watts-Dunton was content only to dream and, alas, to procrastinate, at least in the matter of screwing himself up to the preparation of a book. In that respect he was the despair even of his dearest friends.

Francis Hinde Groome wrote to me as far back as January, 1896:

“Watts, I hope, has not definitely abandoned the idea of a Life of Rossetti, or he might, he suggests, weave his reminiscences of him into his own reminiscences. But I doubt. The only way, I believe, would be for some one regularly day after day to engage him in talk for a couple of hours and for a shorthand writer to be present to take it down. If I had the leisure I would try and incite him thereto myself.”

I agree with Groome that that was the only way out of the difficulty. Left to himself, I doubt whether Watts-Dunton would ever have permitted even Aylwin, ready for publication as it was, to see the light. Of the influences which were brought to bear to persuade him ultimately to take the plunge, and by whom exerted, no less than of the reasons why the book was so long withheld, I shall not here write. Mr. Douglas says nothing of either matter in his book, and the presumption is that he was silent by Watts-Dunton’s own wish. This, however, I may add, that were the reasons for withholding the book so long fully known, they would afford yet another striking proof of the chivalrous loyalty of Watts-Dunton’s friendship. One reason—it is possible that even Mr. Douglas is not aware of it, for it dates back to a time when he did not know Watts-Dunton, and I have reason to believe that the author of Aylwin spoke of it only at the time, and then only to a few intimates, nearly all of whom are now dead—I very much regret I do not feel free to make known. It would afford an unexampled instance of Watts-Dunton’s readiness to sacrifice his own interests and inclinations, in order to assist a friend—in this case not a famous, but a poor and struggling one.

If his unwillingness to see his own name on the back of a book was a despair to his friends, it must have been even more so to some half-dozen publishers who might be mentioned. The enterprising publisher who went to him with some literary project, Watts-Dunton “received,” in the words of the late Mr. Harry Fragson’s amusing song, “most politely.” At first he hummed and haw’d and rumpled his hair protesting that he had not the time at his disposal to warrant him in accepting a commission to write a book. But if the proposed book were one that he could write, that he ought to write, he became sympathetically responsive and finally glowed, like fanned tinder, touched by a match, under the kindling of the publisher’s pleading. “Yes,” he would say. “I cannot deny that I could write such a book. Such a book, I do not mind saying in confidence, has long been in my mind, and in the mind of friends who have repeatedly urged me to such work.” The fact is that Watts-Dunton was gratified by the request and did not disguise his pleasure, for with all his vast learning and acute intellect there was a singular and childlike simplicity about him that was very lovable. Actually accept a commission to write the book in question he would not, but he was not unwilling to hear the proposed terms, and in fact seemed so attracted by, and so interested in, the project that the pleased publisher would leave, conscious of having done a good morning’s work, and of having been the first to propose, and so practically to bespeak, a book that was already almost as good as written, already almost as good as published, already almost as good as an assured success. Perhaps he chuckled at the thought of the march he had stolen on his fellow publishers, who would envy him the inclusion of such a book in his list. Possibly, even, he turned in somewhere to lunch, and, as the slang phrase goes, “did himself well” on the strength of it.

But whatever the publisher’s subsequent doings, the chances were that Watts-Dunton went back to his library, to brood over the idea, very likely to write to some of us whose advice he valued, or more likely still to telegraph, proposing a meeting to discuss the project (I had not a few such letters and telegrams from him myself); perhaps in imagination to see the book written and published; but ultimately and inevitably—to procrastinate and in the end to let the proposal lapse. Like the good intentions with which, according to the proverb, the road to perdition is paved, Watts-Dunton’s book-writing intentions, if intentions counted, would in themselves go far to furnish a fat corner of the British Museum Library. That he never carried these intentions into effect is due to other reasons than procrastination.

It is only fair to him to remember that his life-work, his magnum opus, must be looked for not in literature but in friendship. Stevenson’s life-work was his art. “I sleep upon my art for a pillow,” he wrote to W. E. Henley. “I waken in my art; I am unready for death because I hate to leave it. I love my wife, I do not know how much, nor can, nor shall, unless I lost her; but while I can conceive of being widowed, I refuse the offering of life without my art; I am not but in my art; it is me; I am the body of it merely.”

Watts-Dunton’s life-work, I repeat, was not literature nor poetry, but friendship. Stevenson sacrificed himself in nothing for his friends. On the contrary, he looked to them to sacrifice something of time and interest and energy on his behalf. Watts-Dunton’s whole life was one long self-sacrifice—I had almost written one fatal self-sacrifice—of his own interests, his own fame, in the cause of his friends. His best books stand upon our shelves in every part of the English-speaking world, but the name that appears upon the cover is not that of Theodore Watts-Dunton, but of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. He wrote no Life of either, but how much of their life and of their life’s best work we owe to Watts-Dunton we shall never know. Their death was a cruel blow to him; but, had he died first, the loss to Rossetti and to Swinburne would have been terrible and irreparable. Just as, to Stevenson, life seemed almost unimaginable without his art, so I find it hard, almost impossible, to picture Swinburne’s life at The Pines, failing the sustaining and brotherly presence of Watts-Dunton. Often, when Watts-Dunton was ailing, I have come away from there with a sinking at my heart lest it should be Watts-Dunton who died first, and I can well believe that, long ago, a like dread sometimes possessed those who loved Rossetti. Cheerfully and uncomplainingly, Watts-Dunton gave his own life and his own life’s work for them, and his best book is the volume of his devotion to his friends.