I am always glad to remember that on this, my last meeting with Watts-Dunton, he was—though evidently weakening and ailing in body—intellectually at his best. He revived old memories of Tennyson, Rossetti, Browning, Lowell, Morris, Matthew Arnold, and many another. He dwelt lovingly once again but with new insight upon the first awakening of the wonder-sense in man, and how this wonder-sense—the beginning whether in savage or in highly civilised races of every form of religion—passed on into worship. Our intercourse that evening was in fact more of a monologue, on his part, than of the usual conversation between two old friends, with interests and intimates in common. I was indeed glad that it should be so, first because Watts-Dunton, like George Meredith (whose talk, though I only heard it once, struck me if more scintillating also as more self-conscious), was a compelling and fascinating conversationalist, and secondly because his slight deafness made the usual give-and-take of conversation difficult.
Not a little of his talk that night was of his wife, his own devotion to her, and the unselfishness of her devotion to him. He spoke of Louise Chandler Moulton, “that adorable woman,” as he called her, whom Swinburne held to be the truest woman-poet that America has given us. He charged me to carry his affectionate greetings to Robertson Nicoll. “Only I wish I could see more of him,” he added. “It’s hard to see so seldom the faces one longs to see.”
And then, more faithful in memory to the dead friends of long ago than any other man or woman I have known, he spoke movingly of “our Philip,” his friend and mine, Philip Marston. Then he took down a book from a little bookshelf which hung to the right of the sofa on which he sat, and, turning the pages, asked me to read aloud Marston’s Sonnet to his dead love:
It must have been for one of us, my own,
To drink this cup and eat this bitter bread.
Had not my tears upon thy face been shed,
Thy tears had dropped on mine; if I alone
Did not walk now, thy spirit would have known
My loneliness; and did my feet not tread
This weary path and steep, thy feet had bled
For mine, and thy mouth had for mine made moan.
And so it comforts me, yea, not in vain
To think of thine eternity of sleep;
To know thine eyes are tearless though mine weep.
And when this cup’s last bitterness I drain,
One thought shall still its primal sweetness keep—
Thou hadst the peace, and I the undying pain.
His only comment on the poem was that long and deeply-breathed “Ah!” which meant that he had been profoundly interested, perhaps even profoundly stirred. Often it was his only comment when Swinburne, head erect, eyes ashine, and voice athrill, had in the past stolen into the same room—noiseless in his movements, even when excited—to chaunt to us some new and noble poem, carried like an uncooled bar of glowing iron direct from the smithy of his brain, and still intoning and vibrating with the deep bass of the hammer on the anvil, still singing the red fire-song of the furnace whence it came.
We sat in silence for a space, and then Watts-Dunton said:
“Our Philip was not a great, but at least he was a true poet, as well as a loyal friend and a right good fellow. He is almost forgotten now by the newer school, and among the many new voices, but Louise Chandler Moulton and Will Sharp, and others of us, have done what we could to keep his memory green. We loved him, as Gabriel and Algernon loved him, our beautiful blind poet-boy.”
When soon after I rose reluctantly to go, a change seemed to come over Watts-Dunton. The animation faded out of voice and face, and was replaced by something like anxiety, almost like pain.