Part 7

I agree with Groome that that was the only way out of the difficulty. Left to himself, I doubt whether Watts-Dunton would ever have permitted even _Aylwin_, ready for publication as it was, to see the light. Of the influences which were brought to bear to persuade him ultimately to take the plunge, and by whom exerted, no less than of the reasons why the book was so long withheld, I shall not here write. Mr. Douglas says nothing of either matter in his book, and the presumption is that he was silent by Watts-Dunton’s own wish. This, however, I may add, that were the reasons for withholding the book so long fully known, they would afford yet another striking proof of the chivalrous loyalty of Watts-Dunton’s friendship. One reason--it is possible that even Mr. Douglas is not aware of it, for it dates back to a time when he did not know Watts-Dunton, and I have reason to believe that the author of _Aylwin_ spoke of it only at the time, and then only to a few intimates, nearly all of whom are now dead--I very much regret I do not feel free to make known. It would afford an unexampled instance of Watts-Dunton’s readiness to sacrifice his own interests and inclinations, in order to assist a friend--in this case not a famous, but a poor and struggling one.

If his unwillingness to see his own name on the back of a book was a despair to his friends, it must have been even more so to some half-dozen publishers who might be mentioned. The enterprising publisher who went to him with some literary project, Watts-Dunton “received,” in the words of the late Mr. Harry Fragson’s amusing song, “most politely.” At first he hummed and haw’d and rumpled his hair protesting that he had not the time at his disposal to warrant him in accepting a commission to write a book. But if the proposed book were one that he could write, that he ought to write, he became sympathetically responsive and finally glowed, like fanned tinder, touched by a match, under the kindling of the publisher’s pleading. “Yes,” he would say. “I cannot deny that I could write such a book. Such a book, I do not mind saying in confidence, has long been in my mind, and in the mind of friends who have repeatedly urged me to such work.” The fact is that Watts-Dunton was gratified by the request and did not disguise his pleasure, for with all his vast learning and acute intellect there was a singular and childlike simplicity about him that was very lovable. Actually accept a commission to write the book in question he would not, but he was not unwilling to hear the proposed terms, and in fact seemed so attracted by, and so interested in, the project that the pleased publisher would leave, conscious of having done a good morning’s work, and of having been the first to propose, and so practically to bespeak, a book that was already almost as good as written, already almost as good as published, already almost as good as an assured success. Perhaps he chuckled at the thought of the march he had stolen on his fellow publishers, who would envy him the inclusion of such a book in his list. Possibly, even, he turned in somewhere to lunch, and, as the slang phrase goes, “did himself well” on the strength of it.

But whatever the publisher’s subsequent doings, the chances were that Watts-Dunton went back to his library, to brood over the idea, very likely to write to some of us whose advice he valued, or more likely still to telegraph, proposing a meeting to discuss the project (I had not a few such letters and telegrams from him myself); perhaps in imagination to see the book written and published; but ultimately and inevitably--to procrastinate and in the end to let the proposal lapse. Like the good intentions with which, according to the proverb, the road to perdition is paved, Watts-Dunton’s book-writing intentions, if intentions counted, would in themselves go far to furnish a fat corner of the British Museum Library. That he never carried these intentions into effect is due to other reasons than procrastination.

It is only fair to him to remember that his life-work, his _magnum opus_, must be looked for not in literature but in friendship. Stevenson’s life-work was his art. “I sleep upon my art for a pillow,” he wrote to W. E. Henley. “I waken in my art; I am unready for death because I hate to leave it. I love my wife, I do not know how much, nor can, nor shall, unless I lost her; but while I can conceive of being widowed, I refuse the offering of life without my art; I _am_ not but in my art; it is me; I am the body of it merely.”

Watts-Dunton’s life-work, I repeat, was not literature nor poetry, but friendship. Stevenson sacrificed himself in nothing for his friends. On the contrary, he looked to them to sacrifice something of time and interest and energy on his behalf. Watts-Dunton’s whole life was one long self-sacrifice--I had almost written one fatal self-sacrifice--of his own interests, his own fame, in the cause of his friends. His best books stand upon our shelves in every part of the English-speaking world, but the name that appears upon the cover is not that of Theodore Watts-Dunton, but of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. He wrote no Life of either, but how much of their life and of their life’s best work we owe to Watts-Dunton we shall never know. Their death was a cruel blow to him; but, had he died first, the loss to Rossetti and to Swinburne would have been terrible and irreparable. Just as, to Stevenson, life seemed almost unimaginable without his art, so I find it hard, almost impossible, to picture Swinburne’s life at The Pines, failing the sustaining and brotherly presence of Watts-Dunton. Often, when Watts-Dunton was ailing, I have come away from there with a sinking at my heart lest it should be Watts-Dunton who died first, and I can well believe that, long ago, a like dread sometimes possessed those who loved Rossetti. Cheerfully and uncomplainingly, Watts-Dunton gave his own life and his own life’s work for them, and his best book is the volume of his devotion to his friends.

The sum of that devotion will never fully be known, but it was as much at the service of the unknown, or those who were only little known among us, as of the famous. He had his enemies--“the hated of New Grub Street” was his playful description of himself--and some of them have not hesitated to hint that he attached himself barnacle-wise or parasite-wise to greater men than himself for self-seeking reasons. Borne thither on their backs--it was sometimes said--he was able to sun himself upon Parnassian heights, otherwise unattainable; and being in their company, and of their company, he hoped thus to attract to himself a little of their reflected glory. The truth is that it was not their abilities nor their fame which drew Watts-Dunton to Rossetti and to Swinburne, but his love of the men themselves, and his own genius for friendship. Being the men they were, he would first have been drawn to them, and thereafter have come to love them just as wholly and devotedly had they to the end of their lives remained obscure.

So far from seeking the company or the friendship of the great, he delighted in making friends in humble ranks of life.

Anyone who has accompanied Watts-Dunton on a morning walk will remember a call here at a cottage, a shop, or it may be an inn where lived some enthusiastic but poor lover of books, birds or children, and the glad and friendly greetings that were exchanged. If, as occasionally happened, some great person--great in a social sense, I mean--happened to be a caller at The Pines, when perhaps a struggling young author, painter, or musician, in whom Watts-Dunton was interested or was trying to help, happened to be there, one might be sure that, of the two, it would not be the great man who would be accorded the warmer greeting by Watts-Dunton and--after his marriage--by his gracious, beautiful and accomplished young wife. What he once said of Tennyson is equally true of Watts-Dunton himself. “When I first knew Tennyson,” he said, “I was, if possible, a more obscure literary man than I now am, and he treated me with exactly the same manly respect that he treated the most illustrious people.” Watts-Dunton who, in his poems and in his conversation, could condense into a sentence what many of us could not as felicitously convey in a page, puts the whole matter into two words, “manly respect.” Unless he had good cause to do otherwise, he, no less than Tennyson, was prepared to treat others with “manly respect,” irrespective of fame, riches, or rank. That is the attitude neither entirely of the aristocrat nor of the democrat, but of the gentleman to whom what we call “snobbishness” is impossible.

One more reason why Watts-Dunton’s contribution to “Letters” in the publishers’ lists runs to no greater extent than two volumes, is that so many of his contributions to “Letters” took the form of epistles to his friends. The writing of original, characteristic and charming letters--brilliant by reason of vivid descriptive passages, valuable because used as a means of expressing criticism or conveying knowledge--is an art now so little practised as likely soon to be lost.

Watts-Dunton’s letter writing was possibly the outcome of his habit of procrastination. To put off the settling down in dead earnest to some work which he felt ought to be done, but at which he “shied,” he would suddenly remember a letter which he thought should be penned. “I must write So-and-so a line first,” he would say, which line, when it came to be written, proved to be an essay in miniature, in which he had--carelessly, and free from the irking consciousness that he was writing for publication and so must mind his words--thrown off some of his weightiest and wisest thoughts. He protested throughout his life that he was a wickedly bad correspondent. None the less he wrote so many charming and characteristic letters that, could they--and why not?--be collected, they would add yet another to the other reputations he attained.

Swinburne, in recent years at least, did not share his friend’s predilection for letter writing. The author of _Atalanta in Calydon_ once said to me, almost bitterly, that had he in early and middle life refrained from writing and from answering unnecessary letters--unnecessary in the sense that there was no direct call or claim upon him to write or to answer them--there would be at least twelve more volumes by him, and of his best, in the publishers’ lists. One letter which arrived when I was a guest at The Pines led Swinburne to expound his theory of letter answering. It was from a young woman personally unknown to him, and began by saying that a great kindness he had once done to her father emboldened her to ask a favour to herself--what it was I now forget, but it necessitated a somewhat lengthy reply.

“The fact that I have been at some pains to serve the father, so far from excusing a further claim by the daughter, is the very reason why, by any decent member of that family, I should not again be assailed,” Swinburne expostulated.

“She says,” he went on, “that she trusts I won’t think she is asking too much, in hoping that I will answer her letter--a letter which does not interest me, nor concern me in the least. She could have got the information, for which she asks, elsewhere with very little trouble to herself and none to me. The exasperating thing about such letters,” he continued, getting more and more angry, “is this. I feel that the letter is an unwarrantable intrusion. Out of consideration to her father I can’t very well say so, as one does not wish to seem churlish. But, in any sense, to answer her letter, necessitates writing at length, thus wasting much precious time, to say nothing of the chance of being dragged into further correspondence. It is one’s impotency to make such folk see things reasonably which irritates. I have to suppress that irritation, and that results in further irritation. I am irritated with myself for being irritated, for not taking things philosophically as Watts-Dunton does, as well as irritated with her, and the result is the spoiling of a morning’s work. She will say perhaps, and you may even say, ‘It is only one letter you are asked to write.’ Quite so. Not much, perhaps, to make a fuss about. But” (he pounded the table with clenched fist angrily) “multiply that one person by the many who so write, and the net total works out to an appalling waste of time.”

My reply was to remind him of N. P. Willis’s protest that to ask a busy author to write an unnecessary letter was like asking a postman to go for a ten miles’ walk--to which I added, “when he has taken his boots off.” Swinburne had never heard the saying, and, with characteristic veering of the weather-vane of his mood, forgot alike his letter-writing lady and his own irritation, in his delight at a fellow sufferer’s happy hit.

“Capital!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands together gleefully. “Capital! The worm has turned, and shows that, worm as he is, he is not without a sting in his tail!”

In his later years Swinburne wrote few letters except to a relative, a very intimate friend, or upon some pressing business. The uninvited correspondent he rarely answered at all. For every letter that Swinburne received, Watts-Dunton probably received six, and sooner or later he answered all. The amount of time that went in letters, which in no way concerned his own work, or his own interests, and were penned only out of kindness of heart, was appalling. Had he refrained from writing letters intended to hearten or to help some friend or some young writer, or to soften a disappointment, the books that are lost to us--a Life of Rossetti, for instance--might well be to the good. If a book by a friend happened to be badly slated in a critical journal--and no calamity to a friend is borne with more resignation and even cheerfulness by some of us who “write” than a bad review of a friend’s book--Watts-Dunton, if he chanced to see the slating, would put work aside, and sit down then and there to indite to that friend a letter which helped and heartened him or her much more than the slating had depressed. I have myself had letters from fellow authors who told me they were moved to express sympathy or indignation about this or that bad review of one of my little books--the only effect of their letter being to rub salt into the wound, and to make one feel how widely one’s literary nakedness or even literary sinning had been proclaimed in the market place. Watts-Dunton’s letters not only made one feel that the review in question mattered nothing, but he would at the same time find something to say about the merits of the work under review, which not only took the gall out of the unfriendly critic’s ink, but had the effect of setting one newly at work, cheered, relieved, and nerved to fresh effort.

I do not quote here any of these letters, as they are concerned only with my own small writings, and so would be of no interest to the reader. Instead, let me quote one I received from him on another subject. A sister of mine sent me a sonnet in memory of a dead poet, a friend of Watts-Dunton’s and mine, and, having occasion to write to him on another matter, I enclosed it without comment. Almost by return of post came the following note, in which he was at the pains, unasked, to give a young writer the benefit of his weighty criticism and encouragement:

“My thanks for sending me your sister’s lovely sonnet. I had no idea that she was a genuine poet. It is only in the seventh line where I see an opening for improvement.

To _a_ great/darkness and/in a/great light.

It is an error to suppose that when the old scansion by quantity gave place to scansion by accent, the quantitative demands upon a verse became abrogated. A great deal of attention to quantity is apparent in every first-rate line--

The sleepless soul that perished in its prime,

where by making the accent and the quantity meet (and quantity, I need not remind you, is a matter of consonants quite as much as of vowels) all the strength that can be got into an iambic English verse is fixed there. Although, of course, it would make a passage monotonous if in every instance quantity and accent were made to meet, those who aim at the best versification give great attention to it.”

This is one instance only out of many of his interest in a young writer who was then personally unknown to him; but in turning over for the purpose of this article those letters of his, which I have preserved, I have found so many similar reminders of his great-heartedness that I am moved once again to apply to Theodore Watts-Dunton the words in which many years ago I dedicated a book to him. They are from James Payn’s _Literary Recollections_. “My experience of men of letters is that for kindness of heart they have no equal. I contrast their behaviour to the young and struggling, with the harshness of the Lawyer, the hardness of the Man of Business, the contempt of the Man of the World, and am proud to belong to their calling.”

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON

AS AN AMATEUR IN AUTHORSHIP AND AS A GOOD FELLOW

TWO SIDES OF HIS MANY-SIDEDNESS

The one thing of all others upon which Watts-Dunton set store was good-fellowship, which he counted as of greater worth even than genius. If ever he went critically astray, if ever intellectually he overrated his man, it was because he allowed his heart to outride his head. Once convince him that this or that young writer was a good fellow, and, born critic though he was, even criticism went by the board in Watts-Dunton’s intellectual estimate. If I illustrate this by a personal experience it is not to speak of myself, but because, though I have personal knowledge of many similar instances, in this instance I have the “documents” in the case before me. It concerns the circumstances by which I first came to know Watts-Dunton.

In the New Year of 1885 there appeared the first number of a weekly (afterwards a monthly) magazine with the somewhat infelicitous if not feeble title of _Home Chimes_. It was edited and owned by F. W. Robinson, then a popular novelist. To the first number Swinburne and Theodore Watts contributed poems, and in that now dead and forgotten venture the early work of many men and women who thereafter became famous is to be found. For instance, Jerome K. Jerome’s _Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow_ as well as his _Three Men in a Boat_ first saw the light there. There, much of Sir James Barrie’s early work appeared, for I once heard the author of _A Window in Thrums_ say, though I do not suppose he meant to be taken too seriously, that there was a time when to him “London” meant the place where _Home Chimes_ was published. There, early work by Eden Phillpotts, Israel Zangwill, G. B. Burgin, and a host of others who have since “come into their own” was printed, and there, I may say incidentally, part of my own first little book appeared.

“Yes,” Robinson once said to me reminiscently, “it is true that Jerome, Barrie, Phillpotts, Zangwill, Burgin and yourself all more or less ‘came out’ in _Home Chimes_, but I have my doubts sometimes whether the whole of you ever raised the sale of the magazine by so much as a number.”

“On the contrary,” I replied, “my own opinion is that, between us, we killed it.”

Be that as it may, Robinson lost heavily upon _Home Chimes_ and was hit even harder by the death of the “three-decker”--I mean by the ousting of novels in three volumes at thirty shillings in favour of novels in one volume at six shillings. The change, indeed, caused such a drop in his income that he decided to look about him for another means of livelihood outside literature, and when, soon after, an Inspectorship of H.M. Prisons became vacant, he decided to apply for the appointment. For this he had special qualifications, as he had for years closely and critically studied our Prison System and had, in fact, written and published much upon the subject. Knowing how eager he was, for pecuniary reasons, to secure the appointment, and being anxious to do what I could to assist his candidature (I plead guilty to “log-rolling” in this most justifiable instance), I asked the late Mr. Passmore Edwards, proprietor and editor of the _Echo_, the only halfpenny evening paper in those days, to let me write a sketch of Robinson in the “Echo Portrait Gallery” to which I was a contributor. In this sketch--it was signed “C. K.” merely--I touched, purposely, upon Robinson’s close study and special knowledge of the workings and defects of our Prison System. My article was seen by Theodore Watts, who wrote Robinson a letter which the latter sent on to me. It was as follows:

MY DEAR ROBINSON,

I have been delighted by a notice of you in the _Echo_, which I am told is by Coulson Kernahan. That must be a charming fellow who wrote it. Why don’t you collect your loyal supporters around you (there are only two of us, Kernahan and Watts) over a little dinner at your Club?

Yours ever, THEODORE WATTS.

“Robinson, if you had not been the most modest and delicate-minded man in contemporary literature, you would have trebled your fame and trebled your income. That is what C. K. says of you, but I have said it for a quarter of a century.”

This was the beginning of my long friendship with Watts-Dunton, and I enter thus fully into a merely trivial and personal matter for the reason that the letter I have quoted is very characteristic of the writer. “Good fellowship” was, I repeat, the first article in Watts-Dunton’s creed. His very religion was based upon it. He once said to me that were it not that some good men and women would see irreverence where he meant none, and of which he was by temperament and by his very sense of wonder incapable, he should like to write an article “The Good-fellowship of God,” taking as his text the lines of Omar Khayyám, in which the old tent-maker speaks of those who picture a “surly” God:

“And daub His Visage with the Smoke of Hell; They talk of some strict testing of us--Pish! He’s a Good Fellow and ’twill all be well.

“To word it thus may sound profanely to some ears,” commented Watts-Dunton, “but old Khayyám was only trying to express in his pagan way--though I suspect there is as much of FitzGerald as of Omar in the rendering--his belief in the loving Fatherhood of God which is held by every Christian. In fact ‘good-fellowship’ stands to Shakespeare’s ‘cakes-and-ale’-loving, and jolly fraternity, for the ‘Human Brotherhood’ of which the stricter church and chapel going folk speak, and I suspect that there is sometimes less acrimony and a broader human outlook over cakes and ale in an inn than there is over urn-stewed tea, bread and butter and buns in some of the Church or Chapel Tea-meetings that went on when I was a boy.”

My article about Robinson was merely an attempt to set out his qualifications for the post of Inspector of Prisons. Those qualifications were many and my space was limited. Hence the article was as dull and stodgy a recital of facts as ever was written. There was as much in it from which to infer that the writer was a “charming fellow” as there is in a rice pudding by which to prove that the cook can sing divinely. But Robinson was a “good fellow.” My article, among other things, made that at least clear. According to the gospel of good-fellowship as held by Watts-Dunton, a good fellow could be appreciated only by a good fellow, just as he once wrote to me, “My theory always is that a winsome style in prose comes from a man whose heart is good.” I had shown appreciation of his friend, and, partisan and hero of friendship that he was, he was willing to take the rest on trust. Rightly to appreciate his friend was to win Watts-Dunton’s heart at the start.