THE LAST DAYS OF THEODORE
WATTS-DUNTON
The pathetic side of the last two or three years of Watts-Dunton’s life was that he had outlived nearly every friend of youth and middle age, and, with the one or two old friends of his own generation who survived, he had lost touch. Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, William Morris, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Borrow, William Black, Dr. Gordon Hake, Westland and Philip Marston, Jowett, Louise Chandler Moulton, William Sharp, James Russell Lowell, George Meredith, were gone. Mr. William Rossetti, the only one of the old fraternity left, now rarely, he tells me, leaves his own home. In any case he and Watts-Dunton had not met for years. Mr. Edmund Gosse, once a frequent and always an honoured visitor to The Pines, was rarely if ever there during the years that I came and went.
It was between Swinburne and Mr. Gosse that the intimacy existed, though by both the inmates he was to the last held in high regard. Mr. Gosse would have the world to believe that he grows old, but no one who knows him either personally or by his writings can detect any sign of advancing years. On the contrary, both in the brilliance of his personality and of his later intellectual achievements, he appears to possess the secret of eternal youth. It was neither oncoming years nor any lessening of friendship between him and Swinburne which was responsible for Mr. Gosse’s defection, but the fact that he had added to his other duties that of Librarian to the House of Lords. This, and his many and increasing official and literary activities, kept, and keep him closely occupied, and so it was that his name gradually, insensibly, dropped out of the list of visitors at The Pines.
Mr. Thomas Hake was with Watts-Dunton to the end, and indeed it was not a little due to the help of “The Colonel” (the name by which from his boyhood Mr. Hake was known at The Pines on account of his cousinship with and his likeness to Colonel, afterwards General Charles Gordon) that Watts-Dunton accomplished so much literary work in his last decade. Some of the younger men, Mr. Clement Shorter, accompanied now and then by his poet-wife, Mr. James Douglas, Mr. Henniker-Heaton, Dr. Arthur Compton-Rickett, and Mr. F. G. Bettany, remained in touch with The Pines until Watts-Dunton’s death. I met none of them there myself, as after I went to live a long way from London my own visits were less frequent, and being a friend of older standing, with memories in common which none of the newer friends whom I have mentioned shared, it was generally arranged that I was the only guest. That there was no forgetfulness or lessening of friendship on Watts-Dunton’s part towards the friends whom he now rarely met, is evident by the following extract from a letter in reply to a question on my part whether it would be possible for him to be my guest at one of the Whitefriars’ Club weekly gatherings.
“I should look forward,” he said, “to seeing some of the truest and best friends I have in the world, including yourself, Robertson Nicoll, Richard Whiteing, and Clement Shorter. And when you tell me that F. C. Gould is a Friar (the greatest artistic humorist now living in England) I am tempted indeed to run counter to my doctor’s injunctions against dining out this winter.
“The other day I had the extreme good luck to find and buy the famous lost water-colour drawing of the dining-room at 16 Cheyne Walk, with Rossetti reading out to me the proofs of Ballads and Sonnets. I am sending photographs of it to one or two intimate friends, and I enclose you one. The portrait of Rossetti is the best that has ever been taken of him.”
Of all the friendships which Watts-Dunton formed late in life none was so prized by him as that with Sir William Robertson Nicoll. As it was I who made the two known to each other, and in doing so, removed an unfortunate and what might have been permanent misunderstanding, I may perhaps be pardoned for referring to the matter here.
The name of Sir William coming up one day in a conversation, I discovered to my surprise that Watts-Dunton was feeling sore about some disparaging remark which Sir William was supposed to have made about him. I happened to know how the misunderstanding came about, and I told Watts-Dunton the following true story, illustrating how easily such misunderstandings arise, and illustrating too the petty and “small beer” side of “literary shop” gossip. It concerned an editor and an author. The author employed a literary agent, who offered the editor one of the author’s stories. “I have set my face against the middleman in literature,” the editor replied. “If Mr. —— likes to offer me his story direct, I’ll gladly take it, and pay his usual price per thousand words, but buy it through an agent I won’t.”
This came to the ears of the author, who remarked: “That’s rather unreasonable on ——’s part. I buy, through an agent, the periodical he edits. I don’t expect him to stand in the gutter, like a newsboy, selling me his paper himself at a street corner, and I don’t see why he should object to my offering him my wares by means of an agent.”
This not unfriendly remark was overheard by some one, who told it to some one else, who repeated it to another person, that person in his turn passing it on, and so it went the round of Fleet Street and certain literary clubs. The copper coinage of petty personal gossip, unlike the pound sterling coin of the realm, becomes magnitudinally greater, instead of microscopically less, by much circulation. Instead of infinitesimal attritions, as in the case of the coin, there are multitudinous accretions, until the story as it ultimately started life, and the story as it afterwards came to be told, would hardly recognise each other, at sight, as blood relatives. By the time the innocent remark of the author came to the ears of the editor concerned, it had so grown and become so garbled, that its own father would never have known it. “Have you heard what So-and-so the author said about you?” the editor was asked. “He said that he hoped to live to see you in the gutter, selling at the street corner the very paper you now edit.” Not unnaturally the editor’s retort was uncomplimentary to the author, who, when the retort came to his ears, expressed an opinion about the editor which was concerned with other matters than the editorial objection to the middleman in literature, and so a misunderstanding (fortunately long since removed) arose in good earnest.