Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic

by James Douglas

I am strictly prohibited by the subject of this study from giving any personal description of him. For my part I do not sympathize with this extreme sensitiveness and dislike to having one’s personal characteristics described in print. What is there so dreadful or so sacred in mere print? The feeling upon this subject is a reminiscence, I think, of archaic times, when between conversation and printed matter there was ‘a great gulf fixed.’ Both Mr. Watts-Dunton and his friend Mr. Swinburne must be aware that as soon as they have left any gathering of friends or strangers, remarks—delicate enough, no doubt—are made about them, as they are made about every other person who is talked about in ever so small a degree. Not so very long ago I remained in a room after Mr. Watts-Dunton had left it. Straightway there were the freest remarks about him, not in the least unkind, but free. Some did not expect to see so dark a man; some expected to see him much darker than they found him to be; some recalled the fact that Miss Corkran, in her reminiscences, described his dark-brown eyes as ‘green’—through a printer’s error, no doubt. Some then began to contrast his appearance with that of his absent friend, Mr. Swinburne—and so on, and so on. Now, what is the difference between being thus discussed in print and in conversation? Merely that the printed report reaches a wider—a little wider—audience. That is all. I do not think it is an unfair evasion of his prohibition to reproduce one of the verbal snap-shots of him that have appeared in the papers. Some energetic gentleman—possibly some one living in the neighbourhood—took the following ‘Kodak’ of him. It appeared in ‘M.A.P.’ and it is really as good a thumb-nail portrait of him as could be painted. In years to come, when he and I and the ‘Kodaker’ are dead, it may be found more interesting, perhaps, than anything I have written about him:—

“Every, or nearly every, morning, as the first glimmer of dawn lightens the sky, there appears on Wimbledon Common a man, whose skin has been tanned by sun and wind to the rich brown of the gypsies he loves so well; his forehead is round, and fairly high; his brown eyes and the brow above them give his expression a piercing appearance. For the rest, his voice is firm and resonant, and his brown hair and thick moustache are partially shot with grey. But he looks not a day over forty-five. Generally he carries a book. Often, however, he turns from it to watch the birds and the rabbits. For—it will be news to lie-abeds of the district—Wimbledon Common is lively with rabbits, revelling in the freshness of the dawn, rabbits which ere the rush for the morning train begins, will all have vanished until the moon rises again. To him, morning, although he has seen more sunrises than most men, still makes an ever fresh and glorious pageant. This usually solitary figure is that of Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, and to his habit of early rising the famous poet, novelist, and critic ascribes his remarkable health and vigour.”

The holidays of the two poets have not been confined to their visits to the sea-side. One place of retreat used to be the residence of the late Benjamin Jowett, at Balliol, when the men were down, or one of his country places, such as Boar’s Hill.

I have frequently heard Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Watts-Dunton talk about the famous Master of Balliol. I have heard Mr. Swinburne recall the great admiration which Jowett used to express for Mr. Watts-Dunton’s intellectual powers and various accomplishments. There was no one, I have heard Mr. Swinburne say, whom Jowett held in greater esteem. That air of the college don, which has been described by certain of Jowett’s friends, left the Master entirely when he was talking to Mr. Watts-Dunton.

Among the pleasant incidents in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s life were these visits with Mr. Swinburne to Jowett’s house, where he had the opportunity of meeting some of the most prominent men of the time. He has described the Balliol dinner parties, but I have no room here to do more than allude to them. I must, however, quote his famous pen portrait of Jowett which appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ of December 22, 1894.

“It may seem difficult to imagine many points of sympathy between the poet of ‘Atalanta’ and the student of Plato and translator of Thucydides; and yet the two were bound to each other by ties of no common strength. They took expeditions into the country together, and Mr. Swinburne was a not infrequent guest at Balliol and also at Jowett’s quiet autumnal retreat at Boar’s Hill. The Master of Balliol, indeed, had a quite remarkable faculty of drawing to himself the admiration of men of poetic genius. To say which poet admired and loved him most deeply—Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, or Mr. Swinburne—would be difficult. He seemed to join their hands all round him, and these intimacies with the poets were not the result of the smallest sacrifice of independence on the part of Jowett. He was always quite as frank in telling a poet what he disliked in his verses as in telling him what he liked. And although the poets of our own epoch are, perhaps, as irritable a race as they were in times past, and are as little impervious as ever to flattery, it is, after all, in virtue partly of a superior intelligence that poets are poets, and in the long run their friendship is permanently given to straightforward men like Jowett. That Jowett’s judgment in artistic matters, and especially in poetry, was borné no one knew better than himself, and he had a way of letting the poets see that upon poetical subjects he must be taken as only a partially qualified judge, and this alone gained for him a greater freedom in criticism than would otherwise have been allowed to him. For, notwithstanding the Oxford epigram upon him as a pretender to absolute wisdom, no man could be more modest than he upon subjects of which he had only the ordinary knowledge. He was fond of quoting Hallam’s words that without an exhaustive knowledge of details there can be no accurate induction; and where he saw that his interlocutor really had special knowledge, he was singularly diffident about expressing his opinion. They are not so far wrong who take it for granted that one who was able to secure the loving admiration of four of the greatest poets of the Victorian epoch, all extremely unlike each other, was not only a great and a rare intelligence, but a man of a nature most truly noble and most truly lovable. The kind of restraint in social intercourse resulting from what has been called his taciturnity passed so soon as his interlocutor realized (which he very quickly did) that Jowett’s taciturnity, or rather his lack of volubility, arose from the peculiarly honest nature of one who had no idea of talking for talking’s sake. If a proper and right response to a friend’s remark chanced to come to his lips spontaneously, he was quite willing to deliver it; but if the response was neither spontaneous nor likely to be adequate, he refused to manufacture one for the mere sake of keeping the ball rolling, as is so often the case with the shallow or uneducated man. It is, however, extremely difficult to write reminiscences of men so taciturn as Jowett. In order to bring out one of Jowett’s pithy sayings, the interlocutor who would record it has also to record the words of his own which awoke the saying, and then it is almost impossible to avoid an appearance of egotism.”

Still more pleasurable than these relaxations at Oxford were the visits that the two friends used to pay to Jowett’s rural retreat at Boar’s Hill, about three miles from Oxford, for the purpose of revelling in the riches of the dramatic room in the Bodleian. The two poets used to spend the entire day in that enchanted room, and then walk back with the Master to Boar’s Hill. Every reader of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry will remember the following sonnets:—

THE LAST WALK FROM BOAR’S HILL
To A. C. S.

I

One after one they go; and glade and heath,
Where once we walked with them, and garden bowers
They made so dear, are haunted by the hours
Once musical of those who sleep beneath;
One after one does Sorrow’s every wreath
Bind closer you and me with funeral flowers,
And Love and Memory from each loss of ours
Forge conquering glaives to quell the conqueror Death.

Since Love and Memory now refuse to yield
The friend with whom we walk through mead and field
To-day as on that day when last we parted,
Can he be dead, indeed, whatever seem?
Love shapes a presence out of Memory’s dream,
A living presence, Jowett golden-hearted.

II

Can he be dead? We walk through flowery ways
From Boar’s Hill down to Oxford, fain to know
What nugget-gold, in drift of Time’s long flow,
The Bodleian mine hath stored from richer days;
He, fresh as on that morn, with sparkling gaze,
Hair bright as sunshine, white as moonlit snow,
Still talks of Plato while the scene below
Breaks gleaming through the veil of sunlit haze.

Can he be dead? He shares our homeward walk,
And by the river you arrest the talk
To see the sun transfigure ere he sets
The boatmen’s children shining in the wherry
And on the floating bridge the ply-rope wets,
Making the clumsy craft an angel’s ferry.

III

The river crossed, we walk ’neath glowing skies
Through grass where cattle feed or stand and stare
With burnished coats, glassing the coloured air—
Fading as colour after colour dies:
We pass the copse; we round the leafy rise—
Start many a coney and partridge, hern and hare;
We win the scholar’s nest—his simple fare
Made royal-rich by welcome in his eyes.

Can he be dead? His heart was drawn to you.
Ah! well that kindred heart within him knew
The poet’s heart of gold that gives the spell!
Can he be dead? Your heart being drawn to him,
How shall ev’n Death make that dear presence dim
For you who loved him—us who loved him well?