Another and much lovelier retreat, whither Mr. Watts-Dunton has always loved to go, is the cottage at Box-hill. Not the least interesting among the beautiful friendships between Mr. Watts-Dunton and his illustrious contemporaries is that between himself and Mr. George Meredith. Mr. William Sharp can speak with authority on this subject, being himself the intimate friend of Mr. Meredith, Mr. Swinburne, and Mr. Watts-Dunton. Speaking of Swinburne’s championship, in the ‘Spectator,’ of Meredith’s first book of poems, Mr. Sharp, in an article in the ‘Pall Mall Magazine,’ of December 1901, says:—
“Among those who read and considered” [Meredith’s work] “was another young poet, who had, indeed, already heard of Swinburne as one of the most promising of the younger men, but had not yet met him. . . . If the letter signed ‘A. C. Swinburne’ had not appeared, another signed ‘Theodore Watts’ would have been published, to the like effect. It was not long before the logic of events was to bring George Meredith, A. C. Swinburne, and Theodore Watts into personal communion.”
The first important recognition of George Meredith as a poet was the article by Mr. Watts-Dunton in the ‘Athenæum’ on ‘Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth.’ After this appeared articles appreciative of Meredith’s prose fiction by W. E. Henley and others. But it was Mr. Watts-Dunton who led the way. The most touching of all the testimonies of love and admiration which Mr. Meredith has received from Mr Watts-Dunton, or indeed, from anybody else, is the beautiful sonnet addressed to him on his seventy-fourth birthday. It appeared in the ‘Saturday Review’ of February 15, 1902:—
TO GEORGE MEREDITH
(ON HIS SEVENTY-FOURTH BIRTHDAY)This time, dear friend—this time my birthday greeting
Comes heavy of funeral tears—I think of you,
And say, ‘’Tis evening with him—that is true—
But evening bright as noon, if faster fleeting;
Still he is spared—while Spring and Winter, meeting,
Clasp hands around the roots ’neath frozen dew—
To see the ‘Joy of Earth’ break forth anew,
And hear it on the hillside warbling, bleating.’Love’s remnant melts and melts; but, if our days
Are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, still,
Still Winter has a sun—a sun whose rays
Can set the young lamb dancing on the hill,
And set the daisy, in the woodland ways,
Dreaming of her who brings the daffodil.
The allusion to ‘funeral tears’ was caused by one of the greatest bereavements which Mr. Watts-Dunton has sustained in recent years, namely, that of Frank Groome, whose obituary he wrote for the ‘Athenæum.’ I have not the honour of knowing Meredith, but I have often heard Mr. Watts-Dunton describe with a glow of affectionate admiration the fine charm of his character and the amazing pregnancy in thought and style of his conversation.
But the most memorable friendship that during their joint occupancy of ‘The Pines’ Mr Watts-Dunton formed, was that with Tennyson.
I have had many conversations with Mr. Watts-Dunton on the subject of Tennyson, and I am persuaded that, owing to certain incongruities between the external facets of Tennyson’s character and the ‘abysmal deeps’ of his personality, Mr. Watts-Dunton, after the poet’s son, is the only man living who is fully competent to speak with authority of the great poet. Not only is he himself a poet who must be placed among his contemporaries nearest to his more illustrious friend, but between Mr. Watts-Dunton and Tennyson from their first meeting there was an especial sympathy. So long ago as 1881 was published his sonnet to Tennyson on his seventy-first birthday. It attracted much attention, and although it was not sent to the Laureate, he read it and was much touched by it, as well he might be, for it is as noble a tribute as one poet could pay to another:—
To Alfred Tennyson, on his publishing, in his seventy-first year, the most richly various volume of English verse that has appeared in his own century.
Beyond the peaks of Kaf a rivulet springs
Whose magic waters to a flood expand,
Distilling, for all drinkers on each hand,
The immortal sweets enveiled in mortal things.
From honeyed flowers,—from balm of zephyr-wings,—
From fiery blood of gems, [286] through all the land,
The river draws;—then, in one rainbow-band,
Ten leagues of nectar o’er the ocean flings.Rich with the riches of a poet’s years,
Stained in all colours of Man’s destiny,
So, Tennyson, thy widening river nears
The misty main, and, taking now the sea,
Makes rich and warm with human smiles and tears
The ashen billows of Eternity.
Some two or three years after this Mr. Watts-Dunton met the Laureate at a garden party, and they fraternized at once. Mr. Watts-Dunton had an open invitation to Aldworth and Farringford whenever he could go, and this invitation came after his very first stay at Aldworth. One point in which he does not agree with Coleridge (in the ‘Table Talk’) or with Mr. Swinburne, is the theory that Tennyson’s ear was defective at the very first. He contends that if Tennyson in his earlier poems seemed to show a defective ear, it was always when in the great struggle between the demands of mere metrical music and those of the other great requisites of poetry, thought, emotion, colour and outline, he found it best occasionally to make metrical music in some measure yield. As an illustration of Tennyson’s sensibility to the most delicate nuances of metrical music, I remember at one of those charming ‘symposia’ at ‘The Pines,’ hearing Mr. Watts-Dunton say that Tennyson was the only English poet who gave the attention to the sibilant demanded by Dionysius of Halicarnassus; and I remember one delightful instance that he gave of this. It referred to the two sonnets upon ‘The Omnipotence of Love’ in the universe which I have always considered to be the keynote of ‘Aylwin’ and ‘The Coming of Love.’ These sonnets appeared in an article called ‘The New Hero’ in the ‘English Illustrated Magazine’ in 1883. Mr. Watts-Dunton was staying at Aldworth when the proof of the article reached him. The present Lord Tennyson (who, as Mr. Watts-Dunton has often averred, has so much literary insight that if he had not been the son of the greatest poet of his time, he would himself have taken a high position in literature) read out in one of the little Aldworth bowers to his father and to Miss Mary Boyle the article and the sonnets. Tennyson, who was a severe critic of his own work, but extremely lenient in criticising the work of other men, said there was one feature in one of the lines of one of the sonnets which he must challenge. The line was this:—
And scents of flowers and shadow of wavering trees.