“I shall be delighted,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton; “but I am perfectly sure you can spare no time to see an obscure literary man.”
“On the contrary,” said Lowell, “I always reserve to myself an hour, from five to six, when I see nobody but a friend over a cigarette.”
Some time after this Mr. Watts-Dunton did call on Lowell, and spent an hour with him over a cigarette; and at last it became an institution, this hour over a cigarette once a week.
This went on for a long time, and Mr. Watts-Dunton is fond of recalling the way in which Lowell’s Anglophobia became milder and milder, ‘fine by degrees and beautifully less,’ until at last it entirely vanished. Then it was followed by something like Anglo-mania. Lowell began to talk with the greatest appreciation of a thousand English institutions and ways which he would formerly have deprecated. The climax of this revolution was reached when Mr. Watts-Dunton said to him:
“Lowell, you are now so much more of a John Bull than I am that I have ceased to be able to follow you. The English ladies are—let us say, charming; English gentlemen are—let us say, charming, or at least some of them. Everything is charming! But there is one thing you cannot say a word for, and that is our detestable climate.”
“And you can really speak thus of the finest climate in the world!” said Lowell. “I positively cannot live out of it.”
“Well,” said Mr. Watts-Dunton, “you and I will cease to talk about England and John Bull, if you please. I cannot follow you.”
In relating this anecdote Mr. Watts-Dunton, however, insisted that with all his love of England, Lowell never bated one jot of his loyalty to his own country. There never was a stauncher American than James Russell Lowell. Let one unjust word be said about America, and he was a changed man. Mr. Watts-Dunton has always contended that the present good feeling between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race was due mainly to Lowell. Indeed, he expressed this conviction in one of his finest sonnets. It appeared in the ‘Athenæum’ after Lowell’s death, and it has been frequently reprinted in the United States. It now appears in ‘The Coming of Love.’ It was addressed ‘To Britain and America: On the Death of James Russell Lowell,’
Ye twain who long forgot your brotherhood
And those far fountains whence, through glorious years,
Your fathers drew, for Freedom’s pioneers,
Your English speech, your dower of English blood—
Ye ask to-day, in sorrow’s holiest mood,
When all save love seems film—ye ask in tears—
‘How shall we honour him whose name endears
The footprints where beloved Lowell stood?’Your hands he joined—those fratricidal hands,
Once trembling, each, to seize a brother’s throat:
How shall ye honour him whose spirit stands
Between you still?—Keep Love’s bright sails afloat
For Lowell’s sake, where once ye strove and smote
On waves that must unite, not part, your strands.
This perhaps is the place to say a word about Mr. Watts-Dunton’s feelings towards America, which were once supposed to be hostile. Apart from his intimacy with Lowell, he numbered among his American friends Clarence Stedman, Mrs. Moulton (between whom and himself there has been the most cordial intimacy during twenty-five years), Bret Harte, Edwin Abbey, Joaquin Miller, Colonel Higginson, and, indeed, many prominent Americans. Between Whistler and himself there was an intimacy so close that during several years they saw each other nearly every day. That was before Whistler’s genius had received full recognition. I may recall that during a certain controversy concerning Whistler’s animosity against the Royal Academy the following letter from Mr. Watts-Dunton appeared in the ‘Times’ of August 12, 1903:—