Part 6
“I see that you mention Mr. William Watson as a friend of yours,” he wrote to me. “---- who was here the other day, greatly vexed and even distressed me by telling me that Mr. Watson is under the impression that I have written disparagingly of his work. Why, it was I who at a moment, when Rossetti refused to look at any book sent to him, persuaded him to read _The Prince’s Quest_ years ago, and got him to write to the author (for though a bad correspondent myself, I am exemplary in persuading my friends to be good ones). It was I who wrote to Fisher Unwin when he sent me _Wordsworth’s Grave_, urging him to reprint _The Prince’s Quest_.”
Not once but a score of times he spoke to me of his high admiration of some of Mr. Watson’s poems, as well as of poems by Stephen Phillips, John Davidson, Mrs. Clement Shorter, and many others of the younger poets. His championship of a certain other writer of verse who shall be nameless, involved him in a controversy which was like to end in a personal severance between himself and his correspondent.
“What you said about ---- is specially amusing,” he wrote, “because on the very morning after you were here I got a letter from an acquaintance abusing me to such a degree that I am by no means sure it will not end in a personal severance. And all because I was backing up one whom he describes as the most impudent self-advertising man that has ever claimed to be a poet. According to the irate one, he has nobbled not only New Grub Street complete, but also sub-edits the ---- and writes himself up there, and devotes his time to paragraphing himself in the ----! I pointed out in my answer that to me, who do not read these organs, save slightly, that the question of physical power and time presented itself and made me sceptical as to the possibility of a man who has produced many verses of late, and good ones to boot, being such a prolific rival of Mr. Pears and Mr. Colman, and as I said so in rather a chaffy way, my correspondent has taken umbrage. But oh, ‘these writing fellows!’ as Wellington used to call the knights of the ink-horn.”
I suspect that it was what Watts-Dunton calls his “chaffy way” more than his championship of the verse-maker which gave offence to his correspondent. His humour was of the old-fashioned Dickensian sort, but heavier of foot, more cumbrous of movement, occasionally somewhat grim, and rumbling, like distant thunder, over a drollery. It is possible that what he meant for playful raillery at his correspondent’s exasperation that a verse-maker should enter into a competition with Mr. Colman and Mr. Pears, by advertising his wares in the same way that they advertise mustard or soap, was taken as a seriously meant reproof. Be that as it may, for I did not hear the sequel of the controversy, Watts-Dunton, so far from being the ogre he was painted, was, on the contrary, something of a fairy godmother to many a young and struggling poet of parts. But even so he found that poets not of the first rank are hard to please.
Acknowledging the receipt of a presentation copy of verses from an acquaintance of his and mine, I chanced to inquire whether Theodore Watts was likely to review the book in the _Athenæum_. “God forbid!” wrote the poet in reply. “If so, he would simply make my unfortunate book the peg upon which to hang a wonderful literary robe of spun silk and fine gold. He would begin--omitting all mention of me or my book--with some generalisation, some great first principle, whether of life, literature, science or art, no one, other than himself or the God who made him, could ever be sure beforehand. In his hands it would be absorbingly fresh, learned, illuminative and fascinating. Thence he would launch out into an essay, incomparable in knowledge and in scholarship, that would deal with everything in heaven or on earth, in this world or the next, other than my unhappy little book. He would, in fact, open up so many worlds of wonder and romance, in which to lose himself, that I should think myself fortunate if, at the end of his review, I found my name as much as mentioned, and should count myself favoured were there as much as one whole line in the whole four page essay in the _Athenæum_ about my little book.”
I am free to admit that there is much that is true in the analysis of Watts-Dunton’s method of reviewing, and that he was aware of this himself will be seen by my next quotation. It so happened that he did, much pressed though he was at the time, put his own work aside, and review the book in question in the _Athenæum_. He did so from the single desire to forward the interests of a young poet.
Here is part of a letter which he afterwards sent to me upon the subject. The review itself I did not see, but that it was upon the lines anticipated and failed to satisfy the poet in question is very clear.
“My method of reviewing, though it is well understood by the more famous men, does not seem to please and to satisfy the less distinguished ones; and this makes me really timid about reviewing any of them. But I believe, indeed I am sure, that my methods of using a book as an illustration of some first principle in criticism gives it more importance, attracts to it more attention than any more businesslike review article of the ordinary kind would, because my speciality is known to be that of dealing with first principles.
“I am just off again to Dursley in Gloucestershire to visit, with Swinburne, his mother and sister, who are staying there.
“I think I have satisfied myself that Shakespeare’s evident familiarity with Gloucestershire is owing to his having stayed at Dursley with one of the Shakespeares who was living there during his lifetime. The Gloucestershire names of people mentioned by him are still largely represented at Dursley and the neighbourhood, and the description of the outlook toward Berkeley is amazingly accurate.”
But Watts-Dunton had cause to regret his kindly action in departing from his almost invariable rule to review only poets of the first standing, nor was he allowed, free from irritating distractions, peacefully to pursue his researches into Shakespeare’s associations with Gloucestershire. The poet wrote again--this time to complain that the review was not sufficiently eulogistic. Watts-Dunton sent me the letter with the following comment:
“What the devil would these men have? I suppose we are all to fall at their feet as soon as they have written a few good verses and discuss them as we discuss Sophocles, Æschylus, and Sappho. Does this not corroborate what Swinburne was saying to you the other day about the modesty of the first-rate poet and the something else of the others?”
After Watts-Dunton’s return from Gloucester, I was lunching with Swinburne and himself at The Pines, and the aggrieved poet called in person while I was there. Swinburne, who hated to make a new acquaintance, and not only resolutely refused himself to every one, but, when Watts-Dunton had visitors with whom he was unacquainted, frequently betook himself to his own sanctum upstairs until they were gone, happened that morning to be in an impish mood. At any other time he would have stormed at the bare suggestion of admitting the man to the house. But on this particular morning he took a Puck-like delight in the hornets’ nest which Watts-Dunton had brought about his ears by what Swinburne held to be an undeserved honour and kindness to an undeserving and ungrateful scribbler, and he wished, or pretended to wish, that the poet be admitted. He vowed, and before heaven, that a windy encounter between the “grave and great-browed critic of the _Athenæum_” and the “browsing and long-eared bardling with a grievance” would be as droll as a comedy scene from _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_.
Watts-Dunton--outwardly smiling indulgently at his friend’s whimsical and freakish mood, but inwardly by no means regarding the matter in the light of a jest, and not a little chafed and sore--declined to see the caller then or at any other time.
“Reviewing poets other than those of the first rank,” he protested, “is the most thankless task on God’s earth. The smaller the man is intellectually, the harder, the more impossible he is to please, and the greedier he is of unstinted adulation. Strain your critical sense and your generosity to the point of comparing him to Marlowe or Marvell, and he will give you to understand that his work has more of the manner of Shelley. Compare him to Shelley, and the odds are he will grumble that it wasn’t Shakespeare, and I’m not sure that some of them would rest contented with that. I have tried to do a kindness, and I have succeeded only in making an enemy. That fellow is implacable. He will pursue me with hatred to the end of my life.”
Yet in this particular instance, as in many others, Watts-Dunton’s error had been only on the side of excessive generosity, for which Swinburne had taken him to task. Swinburne himself, it is idle to say, was a Jupiter in his judgments. He was ready to vacate his own throne and hail one poet as a god, or utterly to overwhelm another with a hurled avalanche of scorn. But at least he reserved his laudation and his worship, or else his “volcanic wrath” and thunderbolts, for his masters and his peers. He delivered judgment uninfluenced by the personal element or by kindly sentiment and easy good nature. Watts-Dunton’s good-hearted efforts to find something to praise in the work even of little men occasionally annoyed Swinburne, and drew the fire of his withering criticism upon the target of their work. It was the one and only thing upon which I knew them to differ, and in this connection I should like to add a word upon the relationship which existed between these two brothers in friendship and in song. Ideal as was that relationship, it had this drawback--that it tended to “standardize,” if I may so phrase it, their prejudices upon purely personal, as apart from critical or intellectual issues.
Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks in _The Professor at the Breakfast Table_ of “that slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity towards each other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they sit side by side together.”
This saying has a mental as well as a physical application. It is surprising, as I have elsewhere said, how entirely Watts-Dunton’s individuality remained uninfluenced by his close association with two men of such strongly-marked and extraordinary individuality as Rossetti and Swinburne. One reservation must, however, be made. On certain personal matters the plumb of Watts-Dunton’s judgment was apt slightly to be deflected out of line by Swinburne’s denunciation. If Swinburne thundered an anathema against some one who had provoked his wrath, Watts-Dunton, even if putting in a characteristically indulgent word for the offender, was inclined--if unconsciously and against his better judgment--to view the matter in the same light.
Similarly, if Watts-Dunton had some small cause of complaint--it might even be a fancied cause of complaint--and Swinburne heard of it, the latter’s attachment to his friend caused him so to trumpet his anger as to magnify the matter to undue importance in Watts-Dunton’s eyes as well as in his own.
In this way and in this way only the association between Watts-Dunton and Swinburne was to the advantage of neither, as the mind of the one reacted sometimes upon the mind of the other to produce prejudice and to impair judgment. I have no thought or intention of belittling either in saying this. It is no service to the memory of a friend to picture him as a superman and superior to all human weakness. But if Watts-Dunton was not without his prejudices and literary dislike, he was as a critic the soul of honour, and would not write a line in review of the work of the man or woman concerning whom he had justly or unjustly already formed an unfavourable opinion. As a reviewer he set a standard which we should do well to maintain. He was no Puritan. To him everything in life was spiritually symbolic, and nothing was of itself common or unclean. The article in which he dealt with Sterne’s indecencies shirks nothing that needed to be said upon the subject, but says it in such a way as to recall Le Gallienne’s happy definition of purity--as the power to touch pitch while remaining undefiled--for in all Watts-Dunton’s spoken no less than in his written word, there was no single passage, no single line, which one could on that score regret. In his poems the red flambeau of passion and the white taper of purity burn side by side on one altar. His innate love of purity, his uncompromising attitude towards everything suggestive or unclean, were among his most marked characteristics as writer and as man. It is well for literature that one of the greatest critics of our day should have thus jealously guarded the honour of the mistress whom he served. As a poet, he was of the company of those who, in his own words:
Have for muse a maiden free from scar, Who knows how beauty dies at touch of sin.
He kept unsullied the white shield of English Literature, and his influence for good is none the less lasting and real because it can never be estimated.
WHY THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON PUBLISHED ONLY TWO BOOKS
With the exception of a few articles and poems reprinted in brochure form from encyclopædias and periodicals, Watts-Dunton in his lifetime published two books only--_Aylwin_ and _The Coming of Love_. A successor to the former is in existence, and will shortly be issued by Mr. John Lane. Were Watts-Dunton still alive, the book would, I am convinced, even now be in manuscript. Part definitely with a book, that it might go to press, he would not, so long as a chance remained of holding on to it, to dovetail in a poem or a prose passage, perhaps from something penned many years ago, or to rewrite, amend, or omit whole chapters. I have seen proofs of his as bewildering in the matter of what printers call “pulling copy about” as a jigsaw puzzle. _Aylwin_ itself represents no one period of the author’s lifetime, but all his literary life, up to the actual final passing for press.
This is true also of the new book _Carniola_, commenced, under the title of _Balmoral_, as far back as the days before Watts-Dunton left St. Ives to come to London, and, upon it, he was more or less at work up to the last. It takes its new title from the hero, who, the son of an English father and an Hungarian mother, was christened Carniola, after the Hungarian town of that name where he was born.
The story I have not read in its entirety, but I know that Watts-Dunton considered the love interest stronger even than in _Aylwin_, and his pictures of life more varied and painted in upon a wider canvas.
The portions I have seen strike me--remembering, as has already been said, how little Watts-Dunton’s personality and literary manner were influenced by any of the great contemporaries with whom he was intimately associated--as more Borrovian than anything else he has written.
This applies particularly to the conversations. Unlike some later novelists, who aim at crispness in conversational passages, by so “editing” what is said as to “cut” the inevitable and necessary commonplaces of conversation, and record only what is witty, epigrammatic and to the point, Watts-Dunton, like Borrow, sets all down exhaustively--the “give and take” of small talk, with all the “I saids” and “he saids” in full, and with illuminating little descriptions of the gestures and feelings of the speaker.
This gives a reality and naturalness to the dialogue, which we miss, for all their smartness, crispness, and epigram, in the work of certain more modern novelists, reading whom, one is inclined to wonder whether two ordinary mortals ever did, in real life, rattle off, impromptu, quite so many brilliant repartees, and clever epigrams, in so short a time.
Very Borrovian too are the open-air and nature-loving passages of _Carniola_, and the gypsy scenes of which there are many. Readers of _Aylwin_ will be interested to meet with a gypsy girl, Klari, drawn from real life, who, in Watts-Dunton’s opinion, is more beautiful and more attractive than Sinfi Lovell of _Aylwin_ and _The Coming of Love_. Those who had any personal knowledge, or have read the books, of one of the most fascinating and romantic figures and fine scholars of his time, the late Francis Hinde Groome, will find him drawn--Watts-Dunton believed faithfully--in the character of Stormont.
Another striking piece of characterisation is the wheelwright, Martin, whose “religiosity”--not to be confounded with the sincerity and unselfishness of a truly religious man or woman--is narrow, self-seeking, cruel, and Calvinistic.
“Make a success--and run away from it!” said a great and experienced publisher to me one day. Watts-Dunton made a great success with _Aylwin_. It will be interesting to see whether by following _Aylwin_ with a second novel of Bohemian life--the character on which he has lavished most care is that of an Hungarian gypsy, a Punch and Judy showman, and the scene is laid partly in England and partly in Hungary--Watts-Dunton will prove the publisher to be, in this case at least, wrong.
The rest of Watts-Dunton’s contributions to literature must be sought for in back numbers of the reviews, magazines and critical journals, and as Introductory Studies and Essays prefixed to reprints. That a man of his enormous and many-sided knowledge should apply himself to the craft of letters practically from early manhood to extreme old age, and leave only two published volumes behind him, establishes surely a record in these days of over-publication. One cannot wonder that his readers and admirers should ask that he be more adequately represented on their bookshelves by the collection, into permanent volume form, of his many incomparable articles and essays. Until that is done, I may perhaps be permitted to point out that in a sense such a work already exists. The literary harvest of Watts-Dunton’s life has been reaped, winnowed, and garnered into one volume which, indeed, is not only a volume but a Watts-Dunton library in itself.
I refer of course to Mr. James Douglas’s _Theodore Watts-Dunton, Poet, Novelist and Critic_, a work which with all its faults, and it has many, is of remarkable interest. I do not say this because Mr. Douglas has told us everything that can be told, and much that it was unnecessary to tell about the life and work, the memorable friendships and the literary methods of the author of _Aylwin_, but because Mr. Douglas has with infinite care and pains harvested, sifted, winnowed, and gleaned the whole field of Watts-Dunton’s literary labours. The portion of the book in which the fine gold of his writings upon Wonder as the primal Element in all religion; upon the first awakenings in the soul of man of a sense of Wonder, or perhaps I should say upon the awakening, the birth, of a soul in man by means of Wonder; the noble exposition of the Psalms, the Prayer Book, and of the Bible in its relation to the soul and to the Universe; the analysis of Humour; the portions that deal with Nature and Nature-Worship; with the methods and Art of great writers in poetry and prose, and with First Principles generally--these in themselves and by themselves make Mr. Douglas’s book unique.
I am not sure, indeed, that it will not eventually do more for Watts-Dunton’s reputation as a thinker than the publication of a whole library of his collected writings. For in his contributions to the periodical Press, Watts-Dunton is apt sometimes to be diffuse. He becomes befogged, as it were, with the multitudinousness of his own learning. His “cogitations”--the word is more applicable to most of his work than “essays”--were so prodigious, branched out into such innumerable but always fascinating and pregnant side issues, as to bewilder the ordinary reader. In Mr. Douglas’s book with such judgment are the passages selected, that we get the best of Watts-Dunton in a comparatively small compass, clarified, condensed, and presented with cameo clearness. It contains, I admit, not a little with which I would willingly away. I tire sometimes of gypsies and gorgios and Sinfi Lovell, as I tire of the recurrence of the double-syllabled feminine rhyming of “glory” and “story,” “hoary” and “promontory,” in some of the sonnets.
Mr. Douglas quotes Rossetti as affirming of Watts-Dunton that he was the one man of his time who with immense literary equipment was without literary ambition. This may be true of the Theodore Watts of Rossetti’s time. It is not altogether true of the Watts-Dunton whom I knew during the last quarter of a century.
The extraordinary success of _Aylwin_, published, be it remembered--though some of us had been privileged to see it long before--in 1898, when the author was 66, bewildered and staggered Watts-Dunton, but the literary ambitions which that success aroused came too late in life to be realised. Though a prodigious and untiring worker, he was unsystematic and a dreamer. The books that he intended to write would have outnumbered the unwritten volumes of Robert Louis Stevenson. Had Stevenson lived longer, his dream-books would one day have materialised into manuscript and finally into paper and print. He was one of those whom Jean Paul Richter had in mind when he said: “There shall come a time when man shall awaken from his lofty dreams and find--his dreams still there, and that nothing has gone save his sleep.” Stevenson worked by impulse. His talk and his letters--like too plenteously-charged goblets, which brim over and run to waste--were full of stories he was set upon writing, but from which on the morrow he turned aside to follow some literary Lorelei whose lurings more accorded with the mood of the moment.
“I shall have another portfolio paper so soon as I am done with this story that has played me out,” he wrote to Sir Sidney Colvin in January, 1875. “The story is to be called _When the Devil was Well_. Scene, Italy, Renaissance; colour, purely imaginary of course, my own unregenerate idea of what Italy then was. O, when shall I find the story of my dreams, that shall never halt nor wander one step aside, but go ever before its face and ever swifter and louder until the pit receives its roaring?”
But Stevenson worked of set purpose, and, for the most part, sooner or later in another mood, went rainbow-chasing again, hoping to find--like the pot of gold which children believe lies hidden where the rainbow ends--his broken fragments of a dream that he might recover and weave them into story form.
Sometimes he succeeded; sometimes he found that the vision had wholly faded, or that the mood to interpret it had gone, and so more often he failed. But Watts-Dunton was content only to dream and, alas, to procrastinate, at least in the matter of screwing himself up to the preparation of a book. In that respect he was the despair even of his dearest friends.
Francis Hinde Groome wrote to me as far back as January, 1896:
“Watts, I hope, has _not_ definitely abandoned the idea of a Life of Rossetti, or he might, he suggests, weave his reminiscences of him into his own reminiscences. But I doubt. The only way, I believe, would be for some one regularly day after day to engage him in talk for a couple of hours and for a shorthand writer to be present to take it down. If I had the leisure I would try and incite him thereto myself.”