In good company

by Coulson Kernahan

I should not put this chronicle of journalistic small beer—a version as it is of the famous Three Black Crows story—on record, were it not that it was exactly in the same way that an innocent remark of Sir William Robertson Nicoll’s had been misrepresented to Watts-Dunton. This I did my best to explain to the latter, but not feeling as sure as I wished to be that all soreness was removed, I asked him to lunch with me at the Savage Club, and then invited Dr. Nicoll, as he then was, to meet him. There was at first just a suspicion of an armed truce about Watts-Dunton, in whose memory the supposed attack upon himself was still smouldering, but his interest and pleasure in the conversation of a student and scholar of like attainments to his own soon dispelled the stiffness. A chance but warmly affectionate reference to Robertson Smith by Dr. Nicoll drew from Watts-Dunton that long-drawn “Ah!” which those who knew him well remember as meaning that he was following with profound attention and agreement what was being said.

“Why, I knew that man—one of the salt of the earth,” he interpolated. Then he added gravely, more reminiscently than as if addressing anyone, “I had affection for him!” Leaning over the table, his singularly brilliant and penetrating eyes full upon the other, he said almost brusquely, “Tell me what you knew of Robertson Smith!”

Dr. Nicoll responded, and within five minutes’ time the two of them were talking together, comparing notes and exchanging experiences and confidences like old friends. As we were parting, Watts-Dunton said to me:

“You are coming to lunch on Monday. I wish I could persuade our friend Nicoll here to accompany you, so that Swinburne could share the pleasure of such another meeting as we have had here to-day.”

The invitation was accepted by Dr. Nicoll with the cordiality with which it was offered, and I may add with the usual result, for the intervener. “Patch up a quarrel between two other persons—and find yourself left out in the cold,” Oscar Wilde once said to me. I had merely removed a misunderstanding, not patched up a quarrel, but the result of my bringing Watts-Dunton, Nicoll, and Swinburne together was that, on the occasion of the first meeting of all three, they had so much to talk about, and talked about it so furiously, that I had cause to ask myself whether the “two” in the proverb should not be amended to “three,” so as to read “Three’s company; four’s none.” Thereafter, and to his life’s end, Watts-Dunton could never speak too gratefully or too appreciatively of Sir William Robertson Nicoll. He came indeed to hold the latter’s judgment alike in literature and scholarship, as in other matters, in the same admiration with which Swinburne held the judgment of Watts-Dunton himself.

Thus far it is only of Watts-Dunton’s friends that I have written, reserving the last place in my list, which in this case is the first in precedence, for the only name with which it is fitting that, in my final word, his name should be coupled. I have said that the pathetic side of his later years was that he had outlived so many of the men and women he loved. To outlive one’s nearest and dearest friends must always be poignant and pathetic, but in other respects Watts-Dunton’s life was a full and a happy one, and never more so than in these later years, for it was then that the one who was more than friend, the woman he so truly loved, who as truly loved him, became his wife. In his marriage, as in his friendships, Watts-Dunton was singularly fortunate. Husband and wife entertained each for the other, and to the last, love, reverence and devotion. If to this Mrs. Watts-Dunton added exultant, even jealous pride in her husband’s intellect, his great reputation and attainments, he was even more proud of her beauty and accomplishments, and his one anxiety was that she should never know a care. When last I saw them together—married as they had then been for many years—it was evident that Watts-Dunton had lost nothing of the wonder, the awe, perhaps even the perplexity, with which from his boyhood and youth he had regarded that mystery of mysteries—womanhood. His love for her was deep, tender, worshipping and abiding, albeit it had something of the fear with which one might regard some exquisite wild bird which, of its own choice, comes to the cage, and, for love’s sake, is content to forgo its native woodland, content even to rest with closed wings within the cage, while without comes continually the call to the green field, the great hills and the glad spaces between sea and sky. Be that as it may, this marriage between a young and beautiful woman—young enough and beautiful enough to have stood for a picture of his adored Sinfi Lovell of Aylwin, whom, in her own rich gypsy type of beauty, Mrs. Watts-Dunton strangely resembled—and a poet, novelist, critic and scholar who was no longer young, no longer even middle-aged, was from first to last a happy one. It is with no little hesitation that I touch even thus briefly and reverently upon a relationship too sacred and too beautiful for further words. Even this much I should not have said were it not that, in marriages where some disparity of age exists, the union is not always as fortunate, and were it not also that I know my friend would wish that his love and gratitude to the devoted wife, who made his married years so supremely glad and beautiful, should not go unrecorded.

The last time I saw Watts-Dunton alive was shortly before his death. I had spent a long afternoon with Mrs. Watts-Dunton and himself, and at night he and I dined alone, as his wife had an engagement. In my honour he produced a bottle of his old “Tennyson” port, lamenting that he could not join me as the doctor had limited him to soda-water or barley-water. When I told him that I had recently been dining in the company of Sir Francis Carruthers Gould, and that “F. C. G.” had described soda-water as “a drink without a soul,” Watts-Dunton was much amused. But, his soulless drink notwithstanding, I have never known him talk more brilliantly. He rambled from one subject to another, not from any lack of power to concentrate or lack of memory, but because his memory was so retentive and so co-ordinating that the mention of a name touched, as it were, an electric button in his memory, which called up other associations.

And by rambling I do not mean that he was discursive or vague. No matter how wide his choice of subject, one was conscious of a sense of unity in all that Watts-Dunton said. Religion might by others, and for the sake of convenience, be divided into creeds, Philosophy into schools of thought, Science into separate headings under the names of Astronomy, Geology, Zoology, Botany, Physics, Chemistry and the like, but by him all these were considered as component parts—the one dovetailing into the other—of a perfect whole. One was conscious of no disconnection when the conversation slid from this science, that philosophy, or religion, to another, for as carried on by him, it was as if he were presenting to the observer’s eye merely different facets of the precious and single stone of truth. His was not the rambling talk of old age, for more or less rambling his talk had been ever since I had known him.

It was due partly also to his almost infinite knowledge of every subject under the sun. The mere mention of a science, of a language, of a system of philosophy, of a bird, a flower, a star, was, as it were, a text upon which he would base one of his wonderful and illuminating disquisitions. His grasp of first principles was so comprehensive that he was able in a few words to present them boldly and clearly for the hearer’s apprehension, whence he would pass on to develop some new line of thought. His interests were to the last so eager and youthful, that even comparatively unessential side-issues—as he spoke of them—suddenly opened up into new and fascinating vistas, down which the searchlight of his imagination would flash and linger, before passing on, from point to point, to the final goal of his thought.

Rossetti often said that no man that ever he met could talk with the brilliancy, beauty, knowledge, and truth of Watts-Dunton, whose very “improvisation” in conversation Rossetti described as “perfect” as a “fitted jewel.” Rossetti deplored, too, on many occasions his “lost” conversations with the author of Aylwin—lost because only by taking them down in shorthand, as spoken, could one remember the half of what was said, its incisive phrasing, its flashing metaphors and similes, and the “fundamental brain work” which lay at the back of all.