The sum of that devotion will never fully be known, but it was as much at the service of the unknown, or those who were only little known among us, as of the famous. He had his enemies—“the hated of New Grub Street” was his playful description of himself—and some of them have not hesitated to hint that he attached himself barnacle-wise or parasite-wise to greater men than himself for self-seeking reasons. Borne thither on their backs—it was sometimes said—he was able to sun himself upon Parnassian heights, otherwise unattainable; and being in their company, and of their company, he hoped thus to attract to himself a little of their reflected glory. The truth is that it was not their abilities nor their fame which drew Watts-Dunton to Rossetti and to Swinburne, but his love of the men themselves, and his own genius for friendship. Being the men they were, he would first have been drawn to them, and thereafter have come to love them just as wholly and devotedly had they to the end of their lives remained obscure.
So far from seeking the company or the friendship of the great, he delighted in making friends in humble ranks of life.
Anyone who has accompanied Watts-Dunton on a morning walk will remember a call here at a cottage, a shop, or it may be an inn where lived some enthusiastic but poor lover of books, birds or children, and the glad and friendly greetings that were exchanged. If, as occasionally happened, some great person—great in a social sense, I mean—happened to be a caller at The Pines, when perhaps a struggling young author, painter, or musician, in whom Watts-Dunton was interested or was trying to help, happened to be there, one might be sure that, of the two, it would not be the great man who would be accorded the warmer greeting by Watts-Dunton and—after his marriage—by his gracious, beautiful and accomplished young wife. What he once said of Tennyson is equally true of Watts-Dunton himself. “When I first knew Tennyson,” he said, “I was, if possible, a more obscure literary man than I now am, and he treated me with exactly the same manly respect that he treated the most illustrious people.” Watts-Dunton who, in his poems and in his conversation, could condense into a sentence what many of us could not as felicitously convey in a page, puts the whole matter into two words, “manly respect.” Unless he had good cause to do otherwise, he, no less than Tennyson, was prepared to treat others with “manly respect,” irrespective of fame, riches, or rank. That is the attitude neither entirely of the aristocrat nor of the democrat, but of the gentleman to whom what we call “snobbishness” is impossible.
One more reason why Watts-Dunton’s contribution to “Letters” in the publishers’ lists runs to no greater extent than two volumes, is that so many of his contributions to “Letters” took the form of epistles to his friends. The writing of original, characteristic and charming letters—brilliant by reason of vivid descriptive passages, valuable because used as a means of expressing criticism or conveying knowledge—is an art now so little practised as likely soon to be lost.
Watts-Dunton’s letter writing was possibly the outcome of his habit of procrastination. To put off the settling down in dead earnest to some work which he felt ought to be done, but at which he “shied,” he would suddenly remember a letter which he thought should be penned. “I must write So-and-so a line first,” he would say, which line, when it came to be written, proved to be an essay in miniature, in which he had—carelessly, and free from the irking consciousness that he was writing for publication and so must mind his words—thrown off some of his weightiest and wisest thoughts. He protested throughout his life that he was a wickedly bad correspondent. None the less he wrote so many charming and characteristic letters that, could they—and why not?—be collected, they would add yet another to the other reputations he attained.
Swinburne, in recent years at least, did not share his friend’s predilection for letter writing. The author of Atalanta in Calydon once said to me, almost bitterly, that had he in early and middle life refrained from writing and from answering unnecessary letters—unnecessary in the sense that there was no direct call or claim upon him to write or to answer them—there would be at least twelve more volumes by him, and of his best, in the publishers’ lists. One letter which arrived when I was a guest at The Pines led Swinburne to expound his theory of letter answering. It was from a young woman personally unknown to him, and began by saying that a great kindness he had once done to her father emboldened her to ask a favour to herself—what it was I now forget, but it necessitated a somewhat lengthy reply.
“The fact that I have been at some pains to serve the father, so far from excusing a further claim by the daughter, is the very reason why, by any decent member of that family, I should not again be assailed,” Swinburne expostulated.
“She says,” he went on, “that she trusts I won’t think she is asking too much, in hoping that I will answer her letter—a letter which does not interest me, nor concern me in the least. She could have got the information, for which she asks, elsewhere with very little trouble to herself and none to me. The exasperating thing about such letters,” he continued, getting more and more angry, “is this. I feel that the letter is an unwarrantable intrusion. Out of consideration to her father I can’t very well say so, as one does not wish to seem churlish. But, in any sense, to answer her letter, necessitates writing at length, thus wasting much precious time, to say nothing of the chance of being dragged into further correspondence. It is one’s impotency to make such folk see things reasonably which irritates. I have to suppress that irritation, and that results in further irritation. I am irritated with myself for being irritated, for not taking things philosophically as Watts-Dunton does, as well as irritated with her, and the result is the spoiling of a morning’s work. She will say perhaps, and you may even say, ‘It is only one letter you are asked to write.’ Quite so. Not much, perhaps, to make a fuss about. But” (he pounded the table with clenched fist angrily) “multiply that one person by the many who so write, and the net total works out to an appalling waste of time.”
My reply was to remind him of N. P. Willis’s protest that to ask a busy author to write an unnecessary letter was like asking a postman to go for a ten miles’ walk—to which I added, “when he has taken his boots off.” Swinburne had never heard the saying, and, with characteristic veering of the weather-vane of his mood, forgot alike his letter-writing lady and his own irritation, in his delight at a fellow sufferer’s happy hit.
“Capital!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands together gleefully. “Capital! The worm has turned, and shows that, worm as he is, he is not without a sting in his tail!”