In his later years Swinburne wrote few letters except to a relative, a very intimate friend, or upon some pressing business. The uninvited correspondent he rarely answered at all. For every letter that Swinburne received, Watts-Dunton probably received six, and sooner or later he answered all. The amount of time that went in letters, which in no way concerned his own work, or his own interests, and were penned only out of kindness of heart, was appalling. Had he refrained from writing letters intended to hearten or to help some friend or some young writer, or to soften a disappointment, the books that are lost to us—a Life of Rossetti, for instance—might well be to the good. If a book by a friend happened to be badly slated in a critical journal—and no calamity to a friend is borne with more resignation and even cheerfulness by some of us who “write” than a bad review of a friend’s book—Watts-Dunton, if he chanced to see the slating, would put work aside, and sit down then and there to indite to that friend a letter which helped and heartened him or her much more than the slating had depressed. I have myself had letters from fellow authors who told me they were moved to express sympathy or indignation about this or that bad review of one of my little books—the only effect of their letter being to rub salt into the wound, and to make one feel how widely one’s literary nakedness or even literary sinning had been proclaimed in the market place. Watts-Dunton’s letters not only made one feel that the review in question mattered nothing, but he would at the same time find something to say about the merits of the work under review, which not only took the gall out of the unfriendly critic’s ink, but had the effect of setting one newly at work, cheered, relieved, and nerved to fresh effort.
I do not quote here any of these letters, as they are concerned only with my own small writings, and so would be of no interest to the reader. Instead, let me quote one I received from him on another subject. A sister of mine sent me a sonnet in memory of a dead poet, a friend of Watts-Dunton’s and mine, and, having occasion to write to him on another matter, I enclosed it without comment. Almost by return of post came the following note, in which he was at the pains, unasked, to give a young writer the benefit of his weighty criticism and encouragement:
“My thanks for sending me your sister’s lovely sonnet. I had no idea that she was a genuine poet. It is only in the seventh line where I see an opening for improvement.
To a great/darkness and/in a/great light.
It is an error to suppose that when the old scansion by quantity gave place to scansion by accent, the quantitative demands upon a verse became abrogated. A great deal of attention to quantity is apparent in every first-rate line—
The sleepless soul that perished in its prime,
where by making the accent and the quantity meet (and quantity, I need not remind you, is a matter of consonants quite as much as of vowels) all the strength that can be got into an iambic English verse is fixed there. Although, of course, it would make a passage monotonous if in every instance quantity and accent were made to meet, those who aim at the best versification give great attention to it.”
This is one instance only out of many of his interest in a young writer who was then personally unknown to him; but in turning over for the purpose of this article those letters of his, which I have preserved, I have found so many similar reminders of his great-heartedness that I am moved once again to apply to Theodore Watts-Dunton the words in which many years ago I dedicated a book to him. They are from James Payn’s Literary Recollections. “My experience of men of letters is that for kindness of heart they have no equal. I contrast their behaviour to the young and struggling, with the harshness of the Lawyer, the hardness of the Man of Business, the contempt of the Man of the World, and am proud to belong to their calling.”
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON
AS AN AMATEUR IN AUTHORSHIP AND
AS A GOOD FELLOW
TWO SIDES OF HIS MANY-SIDEDNESS
The one thing of all others upon which Watts-Dunton set store was good-fellowship, which he counted as of greater worth even than genius. If ever he went critically astray, if ever intellectually he overrated his man, it was because he allowed his heart to outride his head. Once convince him that this or that young writer was a good fellow, and, born critic though he was, even criticism went by the board in Watts-Dunton’s intellectual estimate. If I illustrate this by a personal experience it is not to speak of myself, but because, though I have personal knowledge of many similar instances, in this instance I have the “documents” in the case before me. It concerns the circumstances by which I first came to know Watts-Dunton.
In the New Year of 1885 there appeared the first number of a weekly (afterwards a monthly) magazine with the somewhat infelicitous if not feeble title of Home Chimes. It was edited and owned by F. W. Robinson, then a popular novelist. To the first number Swinburne and Theodore Watts contributed poems, and in that now dead and forgotten venture the early work of many men and women who thereafter became famous is to be found. For instance, Jerome K. Jerome’s Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow as well as his Three Men in a Boat first saw the light there. There, much of Sir James Barrie’s early work appeared, for I once heard the author of A Window in Thrums say, though I do not suppose he meant to be taken too seriously, that there was a time when to him “London” meant the place where Home Chimes was published. There, early work by Eden Phillpotts, Israel Zangwill, G. B. Burgin, and a host of others who have since “come into their own” was printed, and there, I may say incidentally, part of my own first little book appeared.
“Yes,” Robinson once said to me reminiscently, “it is true that Jerome, Barrie, Phillpotts, Zangwill, Burgin and yourself all more or less ‘came out’ in Home Chimes, but I have my doubts sometimes whether the whole of you ever raised the sale of the magazine by so much as a number.”