“On sending in my card I was shown at once into the studio, and after threading my way between some pieces of massive furniture and pictures upon easels, I found D’Arcy lolling lazily upon a huge sofa. Seeing that he was not alone, I was about to withdraw, for I was in no mood to meet strangers. However, he sprang up and introduced me to his guest, whom he called Symonds, an elegant-looking man in a peculiar kind of evening dress, who, as I afterwards learnt, was one of Mr. D’Arcy’s chief buyers. This gentleman bowed stiffly to me.
He did not stay long; indeed, it was evident that the appearance of a stranger somewhat disconcerted him.
After he was gone D’Arcy said: ‘A good fellow! One of my most important buyers. I should like you to know him, for you and I are going to be friends, I hope.’
‘He seems very fond of pictures,’ I said.
‘A man of great taste, with a real love of art and music.’
A little while after this gentleman’s departure, in came De Castro, who had driven up in a hansom. I certainly saw a flash of anger in his eyes as he recognized me, but it vanished like lightning, and his manner became cordiality itself. Late as it was (it was nearly twelve), he pulled out his cigarette case, and evidently intended to begin the evening. As soon as he was told that Mr. Symonds had been there, he began to talk about him in a disparaging manner. Evidently his métier was, as I had surmised, that of a professional talker. Talk was his stock-in-trade.
The night wore on and De Castro, in the intervals of his talk, kept pulling out his watch. It was evident that he wanted to be going, but was reluctant to leave me there. For my part, I frequently rose to go, but on getting a sign from D’Arcy that he wished me to stay I sat down again. At last D’Arcy said:
‘You had better go now, De Castro—you have kept that hansom outside for more than an hour and a half; and besides, if you stay still daylight our friend here will stay longer, for I want to talk with him alone.’
De Castro got up with a laugh that seemed genuine enough, and left us.
D’Arcy, who was still on the sofa, then lapsed into a silence that became after a while rather awkward. He lay there, gazing abstractedly at the fireplace.
‘Some of my friends call me, as you heard De Castro say the other night, Haroun-al-Raschid, and I suppose I am like him in some things. I am a bad sleeper, and to be amused by De Castro when I can’t sleep is the chief of blessings. De Castro, however, is not so bad as he seems. A man may be a scandal-monger without being really malignant. I have known him go out of his way to do a struggling man a service.’
Next morning, after I had finished my solitary breakfast, I asked the servant if Mr. D’Arcy had yet risen. On being told that he had not, I went downstairs into the studio, where I had spent the previous evening. After examining the pictures on the walls and the easels, I walked to the window and looked out at the garden. It was large, and so neglected and untrimmed as to be a veritable wilderness. While I was marvelling why it should have been left in this state, I saw the eyes of some animal staring at me from a distance, and was soon astonished to see that they belonged to a little Indian bull. My curiosity induced me to go into the garden and look at the creature. He seemed rather threatening at first, but after a while allowed me to go up to him and stroke him. Then I left the Indian bull and explored this extraordinary domain. It was full of unkempt trees, including two fine mulberries, and surrounded by a very high wall. Soon I came across an object which, at first, seemed a little mass of black and white oats moving along, but I presently discovered it to be a hedgehog. It was so tame that it did not curl up as I approached it, but allowed me, though with some show of nervousness, to stroke its pretty little black snout. As I walked about the garden, I found it was populated with several kinds of animals such as are never seen except in menageries or in the Zoological Gardens. Wombats, kangaroos, and the like, formed a kind of happy family.
My love of animals led me to linger in the garden. When I returned to the house I found that D’Arcy had already breakfasted, and was at work in the studio.
After greeting me with the greatest cordiality, he said:
‘No doubt you are surprised at my menagerie. Every man has one side of his character where the child remains. I have a love of animals which, I suppose, I may call a passion. The kind of amusement they can afford me is like none other. It is the self-consciousness of men and women that makes them, in a general way, intensely unamusing. I turn from them to the unconscious brutes, and often get a world of enjoyment. To watch a kitten or a puppy play, or the funny antics of a parrot or a cockatoo, or the wise movements of a wombat, will keep me for hours from being bored.’
‘And children,’ I said—‘do you like children?’
‘Yes, so long as they remain like the young animals—until they become self-conscious, I mean, and that is very soon. Then their charm goes. Has it ever occurred to you how fascinating a beautiful young girl would be if she were as unconscious as a young animal? What makes you sigh?’
My thoughts had flown to Winifred breakfasting with her ‘Prince of the Mist’ on Snowdon. And I said to myself, ‘How he would have been fascinated by a sight like that!’
My experience of men at that time was so slight that the opinion I then formed of D’Arcy as a talker was not of much account. But since then I have seen very much of men, and I find that I was right in the view I then took of his conversational powers. When his spirits were at their highest he was without an equal as a wit, without an equal as a humourist. He had more than even Cyril Aylwin’s quickness of repartee, and it was of an incomparably rarer quality. To define it would be, of course, impossible, but I might perhaps call it poetic fancy suddenly stimulated at moments by animal spirits into rapid movements—so rapid, indeed, that what in slower movement would be merely fancy, in him became wit. Beneath the coruscations of this wit a rare and deep intellect was always perceptible.
His humour was also so fanciful that it seemed poetry at play, but here was the remarkable thing: although he was not unconscious of his other gifts, he did not seem to be in the least aware that he was a humourist of the first order; every ‘jeu d’esprit’ seemed to leap from him involuntarily, like the spray from a fountain. A dull man like myself must not attempt to reproduce these qualities here.
While he was talking he kept on painting.”
Chapter XII
WILLIAM MORRIS
It is natural after writing about Rossetti to think of William Morris. In my opinion the masterpiece among all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s ‘Athenæum’ monographs is the one upon him. Between these two there was an intimacy of the closest kind—from 1873 to the day of the poet’s death. This, no doubt, apart from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s graphic power, accounts for the extraordinary vividness of the portrait of his friend. I have heard more than one eminent friend of William Morris say that from a few paragraphs of this monograph a reader gains a far more vivid picture of this fascinating man than is to be gained from reading and re-reading anything else that has been published about him. It is a grievous loss to literature that the man so fully equipped for writing a biography of Morris is scarcely likely to write one. Morris, when he was busy in Queen’s Square, used to be one of the most frequent visitors at the gatherings at Danes Inn with Mr. Swinburne, Dr. Westland Marston, Madox Brown, and others, on Wednesday evenings; and he and Mr. Watts-Dunton were frequently together at Kelmscott during the time of the joint occupancy of the old Manor house, and also after Rossetti’s death.
When Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote ‘Aylwin’ he did not contemplate that the Hurstcote of the story would immediately be identified with Kelmscott Manor. The pictures of localities and the descriptions of the characters were so vivid that Hurstcote was at once identified with Kelmscott, and D’Arcy was at once identified with Rossetti. Morris’s passion for angling is slightly introduced in the later chapters of the book, and this is not surprising, for some of the happiest moments of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s life were spent at Kelmscott. Treffry Dunn’s portrait of him, sitting on a fallen tree beside the back-water, was painted at Kelmscott, and the scenery and the house are admirably rendered in the picture.
Mr. Hake, in ‘Notes and Queries’ (June 7, 1902) mentions some interesting facts with regard to ‘Hurstcote Manor’ and Morris:—
“Morris, whom I had the privilege of knowing very well, and with whom I have stayed at Kelmscott during the Rossetti period, is alluded to in ‘Aylwin’ (chap. lx. book xv.) as the ‘enthusiastic angler’ who used to go down to ‘Hurstcote’ to fish. At that time this fine old seventeenth century manor house was in the joint occupancy of Rossetti and Morris. Afterwards it was in the joint occupancy of Morris and (a beloved friend of the two) the late F. S. Ellis, who, with Mr. Cockerell, was executor under Morris’s will. The series of ‘large attics in which was a number of enormous oak beams’ supporting the antique roof, was a favourite resort of my own; but all the ghostly noise that I there heard was the snoring of young owls—a peculiar sound that had a special fascination for Rossetti; and after dinner Rossetti, my brother, and I, or Mr. Watts-Dunton and I, would go to the attics to listen to them.
With regard to ‘Hurstcote’ I well knew ‘the large bedroom, with low-panelled walls and the vast antique bedstead made of black carved oak’ upon which Winifred Wynne slept. In fact, the only thing in the description of this room that I do not remember is the beautiful ‘Madonna and Child,’ upon the frame of which was written ‘Chiaro dell’ Erma’ (readers of ‘Hand and Soul’ will remember that name). I wonder whether it is a Madonna by Parmigiano, belonging to Mr. Watts-Dunton, which was much admired by Leighton and others, and which has been exhibited. This quaint and picturesque bedroom leads by two or three steps to the tapestried room ‘covered with old faded tapestry—so faded, indeed, that its general effect was that of a dull grey texture’—depicting the story of Samson. Rossetti used the tapestry room as a studio, and I have seen in it the very same pictures that so attracted the attention of Winifred Wynne: the ‘grand brunette’ (painted from Mrs. Morris) ‘holding a pomegranate in her hand’; the ‘other brunette, whose beautiful eyes are glistening and laughing over the fruit she is holding up’ (painted from the same famous Irish beauty, named Smith, who appears in ‘The Beloved’), and the blonde ‘under the apple blossoms’ (painted from a still more beautiful woman—Mrs. Stillman). These pictures were not permanently placed there, but, as it chanced, they were there (for retouching) on a certain occasion when I was visiting at Kelmscott.”
Among the remarkable men that Mr. Watts-Dunton used to meet at Kelmscott, was Morris’s friend, Dr. John Henry Middleton, Slade Professor of Fine Art in the University of Cambridge and Art Director of the South Kensington Museum—a man of extraordinary gifts, who promised to be one of the foremost of the scholarly writers of our time, but who died prematurely. Some of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s anecdotes of the causeries at Kelmscott between Morris, Middleton, and himself, are so interesting that it is a pity they have never been recorded in print. Middleton was one of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s collaborators in the ninth edition of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ to which he contributed the article on ‘Rome,’ one of the finest essays in that work.
Morris was notoriously indifferent to critical expressions about his work; and he used to declare that the only reviews of his works which he ever took the trouble to read were the reviews by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the ‘Athenæum.’ And the poet, might well say this, for those who have studied, as I have, those elaborate and brilliant essays upon ‘Sigurd,’ ‘The House of the Wolfings,’ ‘The Roots of the Mountains,’ ‘The Glittering Plain,’ ‘The Well at the World’s End,’ ‘The Tale of Beowulf,’ ‘News from Nowhere,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ will be inclined to put them at the top of all Mr. Watts-Dunton’s purely critical work. The ‘Quarterly Review,’ in the article upon Morris, makes allusion to the relations between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Morris; so does the writer of the admirable article upon Morris in the new edition of Chambers’s ‘Cyclopædia of English Literature.’ I record these facts, not in order to depreciate the work of other men, but as a justification for the extracts I am going to make from Mr. Watts-Dunton’s monograph in the ‘Athenæum.’
The article contains these beautiful meditations on Pain and Death:—