“And shall I tell you why I have joined the ‘Athenæum’ in place of the ‘Academy’?” said Watts; “it is simply because MacColl invited me, and you did not.”
“For months and months I have been urging you to write in the ‘Academy,’” said Appleton.
“That is true, no doubt,” said Watts, “but while MacColl offered me an important post on his paper, and in the literary department, too, you invited me to do the drudgery of melting down into two columns books upon metaphysics. It is too late, my dear boy, it is too late. If to join the ‘Athenæum’ is to go into the camp of the Philistines, why, then, a Philistine am I.”
I do not know whether at that time Shirley (as Sir John Skelton was then called) and Mr. Watts-Dunton were friends, but I know they were friends afterwards. Shirley, in his ‘Reminiscences’ of Rossetti, like most of his friends, urged Mr. Watts-Dunton to write a memoir of the poet-painter. I do know, however, that Mr. Watts-Dunton, besides cherishing an affectionate memory of Sir John Skelton as a man, is a genuine admirer of the Shirley Essays. I have heard him say more than once that Skelton’s style had a certain charm for him, and he could not understand why Skelton’s position is not as great as it deserves to be. ‘Scotsmen,’ he said, ‘often complain that English critics are slow to do them justice. This idea was the bane of my dear old friend John Nichol’s life. He really seemed to think that he was languishing and withering under the ban of a great anti-Scottish conspiracy known as the Savile Club. As a matter of fact, however, there is nothing whatever in the idea that a Scotsman does not fight on equal terms with the Englishman in the great literary cockpit of London. To say the truth, the Scottish cock is really longer in spur and beak than the English cock, and can more than take care of himself. For my part, with the exception of Swinburne, I really think that my most intimate friends are either Irish, Scottish, or Welsh. But I have sometimes thought that if Skelton had been an Englishman and moved in English sets, he would have taken an enormously higher position than he has secured, for he would have been more known among writers, and the more he was known the more he was liked.’
As will be seen further on, before the review of the ‘Comedy of the Noctes Ambrosianæ’ appeared, Mr. Watts-Dunton had contributed to the ‘Athenæum’ an article on ‘The Art of Interviewing.’ From this time forward he became the chief critic of the ‘Athenæum,’ and for nearly a quarter of a century—that is to say, until he published ‘The Coming of Love,’ when he practically, I think, ceased to write reviews of any kind—he enriched its pages with critical essays the peculiar features of which were their daring formulation of first principles, their profound generalizations, their application of modern scientific knowledge to the phenomena of literature, and, above all, their richly idiosyncratic style—a style so personal that, as Groome said in the remarks quoted in an earlier chapter, it signs all his work.
As I have more than once said, it is necessary to dwell with some fulness upon these criticisms, because the relation between his critical and his creative work is of the closest kind. Indeed, it has been said by Rossetti that ‘the subtle and original generalizations upon the first principles of poetry which illumine his writings could only have come to him by a duplicate exercise of his brain when he was writing his own poetry.’ The great critics of poetry have nearly all been great poets. Rossetti used humourously to call him ‘The Symposiarch,’ and no doubt the influence of his long practice of oral criticism in Cheyne Walk, at Kelmscott Manor, as well as in such opposite gatherings as those at Dr. Marston’s, Madox Brown’s, and Mrs. Procter’s, may be traced in his writings. For his most effective criticism has always the personal magic of the living voice, producing on the reader the winsome effect of spontaneous conversation overheard. Its variety of manner, as well as of subject, differentiates it from all other contemporary criticism. In it are found racy erudition, powerful thought, philosophical speculation, irony silkier than the silken irony of M. Anatole France, airily mischievous humour, and a perpetual coruscation of the comic spirit. To the ‘Athenæum’ he contributed essays upon all sorts of themes such as ‘The Poetic Interpretation of Nature,’ ‘The Troubadours and Trouvères,’ ‘The Children of the Open Air,’ ‘The Gypsies,’ ‘Cosmic Humour,’ ‘The Effect of Evolution upon Literature.’ And although the most complete and most modern critical system in the English language lies buried in the vast ocean of the ‘Examiner,’ the ‘Athenæum,’ and the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ there are still divers who are aware of its existence, as is proved by the latest appreciation of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s work, that contributed by Madame Galimberti, the accomplished wife of the Italian minister, to the ‘Rivista d’ Italia.’ In this article she makes frequent allusions to the ‘Athenæum’ articles, and quotes freely from them. Rossetti once said that ‘the reason why Theodore Watts was so little known outside the inner circle of letters was that he sought obscurity as eagerly as other men sought fame’; but although his indifference to literary reputation is so invincible that it has baffled all the efforts of all his friends to persuade him to collect his critical essays, his influence over contemporary criticism has been and is and will be profound.
There is no province of pure literature which his criticism leaves untouched; but it is in poetry that it culminates. His treatise in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ on ‘Poetry’ is alone sufficient to show how deep has been his study of poetic principles. The essay on the ‘Sonnet,’ too, which appeared in ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia,’ is admitted by critics of the sonnet to be the one indispensable treatise on the subject. It has been much discussed by foreign critics, especially by Dr. Karl Leutzner in his treatise, ‘Uber das Sonett in der Englischen Dichtung.’
The principles upon which he carried on criticism in the ‘Athenæum’ are admirably expressed in the following dialogue between him and Mr. G. B. Burgin, who approached him as the representative of the ‘Idler.’ The allusion to the ‘smart slaters’ will be sufficient to indicate the approximate date of the interview.
“Having read your treatise on poetry in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ which, it is said, has been an influence in every European literature, I want to ask whether a critic so deeply learned in all the secrets of poetic art, and who has had the advantages of comparing his own opinions with those of all the great poets of his time, takes a hopeful or despondent view of the condition of English poetry at the present moment. There are those who run down the present generation of poets, but on this subject the men who are really entitled to speak can be counted on the fingers of one hand. It would be valuable to know whether our leading critic is in sympathy with the poetry of the present hour.”
“I do not for a moment admit that I am the leading critic. To say the truth, I am often amused, and often vexed, at the grotesque misconception that seems to be afloat as to my relation to criticism. Years ago, Russell Lowell told me that all over the United States I was identified with every paragraph of a certain critical journal in which I sometimes write; and, judging from the droll attacks that are so often made upon me by outside paragraph writers, the same misconception seems to be spreading in England—attacks which the smiling and knowing public well understands to spring from writing men who have not been happy in their relations with the reviewers.”
“It has been remarked that you never answer any attack in the newspapers, howsoever unjust or absurd.”
“I do not believe in answering attacks. The public, as I say, knows that there is a mysterious and inscrutable yearning in the slow-worm to bite with the fangs of the adder, and every attack upon a writer does him more good than praise would do. But, as a matter of fact, I have no connexion whatever with any journal save that of a student of letters who finds it convenient on occasion to throw his meditations upon literary art and the laws that govern it in the form of a review. It is a bad method, no doubt, of giving expression to one’s excogitations, and although I do certainly contrive to put careful criticisms into my articles, I cannot imagine more unbusinesslike reviewing than mine. Yet it has one good quality, I think—it is never unkindly. I never will take a book for review unless I can say something in its favour, and a good deal in its favour.”
“Then you never practise the smart ‘slating’ which certain would-be critics indulge in?”
“Never! In the first place, it would afford me no pleasure to give pain to a young writer. In the next place, this ‘smart slating,’ as you call it, is the very easiest thing of achievement in the world. Give me the aid of a good amanuensis, and I will engage to dictate as many miles of such smart ‘slating’ as could be achieved by any six of the smart slaters. A charming phrase of yours, ‘smart slaters’! But I leave such work to them, as do all the really true critics of my time—men to whom the insolence which the smart slaters seem to mistake for wit would be as easy as to me, only that, like me, they hold such work in contempt. Take a critic like Mr. Traill, for instance. Unfortunately, Fate has decreed that many hours every day of his valuable life are wasted on ‘leader’ writing, but there is in any one of his literary essays more wit and humour than could be achieved by all the smart writers combined; and yet how kind is he! going out of his way to see merit in a rising poet, and to foster it. Or take Grant Allen, whose good things flow so naturally from him. While the typical smart writer is illustrating the primal curse by making his poor little spiteful jokes in the sweat of his poor little spiteful brow, Grant Allen’s good-natured sayings have the very wit that the unlucky sweater and ‘slater’ is trying for. Read what he said about William Watson, and see how kind he is. Compare his geniality with the scurrility of the smart writers. Again, take Andrew Lang, perhaps the most variously accomplished man of letters in England or in Europe, and compare his geniality with the scurrility of the smart writers. But it was not, I suppose, of such as they that you came to talk about. You are asking me whether I am in sympathy with the younger writers of my time. My answer is that I cannot imagine any one to be more in sympathy with them than I am. In spite of the disparity of years between me and the youngest of them, I believe I number many of them among my warmest and most loyal friends, and that is because I am in true sympathy with their work and their aims. No doubt there are some points in which they and I agree to differ.”
“And what about our contemporary novelists? Perhaps you do not give attention to fiction?”
“Give attention to novels! Why, if I did not, I should not give attention to literature at all. In a true and deep sense all pure literature is fiction—to use an extremely inadequate and misleading word as a substitute for the right phrase, ‘imaginative representation.’ ‘The Iliad,’ ‘The Odyssey,’ ‘The Æneid,’ ‘The Divina Commedia,’ are fundamentally novels, though in verse, as certainly novels as is the latest story by the most popular of our writers. The greatest of all writers of the novelette is the old Burmese parable writer, who gave us the story of the girl-mother and the mustard-seed. A time which has given birth to such novelists as many of ours of the present day is a great, and a very great, time for the English novel. Criticism will have to recognize, and at once, that the novel, now-a-days, stands plump in the front rank of the ‘literature of power,’ and if criticism does not so recognize it, so much the worse for criticism, I think. That the novel will grow in importance is, I say, quite certain. In such a time as ours (as I have said in print), poetry is like the knickerbockers of a growing boy—it has become too small somehow; it is not quite large enough for the growing limbs of life. The novel is more flexible; it can be stretched to fit the muscles as they swell.”
“I will conclude by asking you what I have asked another eminent critic: What is your opinion of anonymity in criticism?”
“Well, there I am a ‘galled jade’ that must needs ‘wince’ a little. No doubt I write anonymously myself, but that is because I have not yet mastered that dislike of publicity which has kept me back, and my writing seems to lose its elasticity with its anonymity. The chief argument against anonymous criticism I take to be this: That any scribbler who can get upon an important journal is at once clothed with the journal’s own authority—and the same applies, of course, to the dishonest critic; and this is surely very serious. With regard to dishonest criticism it is impossible for the most wary editor to be always on his guard against it. An editor cannot read all the books, nor can he know the innumerable ramifications of the literary world. When Jones asks him for Brown’s book for review, the editor cannot know that Jones has determined to praise it or to cut it up irrespective of its merits; and then, when the puff or attack comes in, it is at once clothed with the authority, not of Jones’s name, but that of the journal.
In the literary arena itself the truth of the case may be known, but not in the world outside, and it must not be supposed but that great injustice may flow from this. I myself have more than once heard a good book spoken of with contempt in London Society, and heard quoted the very words of some hostile review which I have known to be the work of a spiteful foe of the writer of the book, or of some paltry fellow who was quite incompetent to review anything.”
Now that the day of the ‘smart slaters’ is over, it is interesting to read in connection with these obiter dicta the following passage from the article in which Mr. Watts-Dunton, on the seventieth birthday of the ‘Athenæum,’ spoke of its record and its triumphs:—