in good company 12

in good company 12

To intrude into a conversation between strangers was, of course, as

much out of the question as to make known to others, without first

obtaining the writer’s permission, the contents of a letter written

to myself. Otherwise I could easily have convinced the aggrieved

young poet, not only that it was not Theodore Watts who had cut up

his book, but that so far from being a literary Herod and a slayer of

the poetic innocent, he was, as a matter of fact, Herod’s literary

antithesis. As the writer of the letter and those mentioned in it are

no longer with us, no harm can be done by printing part of it here:

 

“Like the rest of us, our Philip was mortal, and, like all of us, he

could be harsh. I got Maccoll to let him review the minor bards. He

was so terribly severe upon most of them that I was miserable; and I

fear that I had to ask Maccoll to be chary in sending them to him,

or at least I got M. to remonstrate with him for his extreme and

unaccountable harshness. My sympathies, as you know, are all with the

younger men. I love to see a young poet, or for the matter of that

_any_ young writer, get recognition.

 

“Robinson is the only fogey-brother I boom. Please tell him when

you see him that if I do not write to him much, it is not because

of any cooling of love. Thirty years ago he knew me for the worst

correspondent in the world. The first letter he ever wrote to me

(in sending me his novel _No Church_) I answered at the end of six

months. I wish I could help it, but I can’t. My friends have to take

me with all my infirmities on my head.”

 

“Our Philip,” I may say, was Philip Bourke Marston, the blind

poet; “Robinson” was F. W. Robinson, the novelist--both friends

of Watts-Dunton and mine--“Maccoll” was the then editor of the

_Athenæum_.

 

Had I known Watts-Dunton better (it was in the early days of our

long friendship that this Coffee House incident happened), I should

studiously have refrained from mentioning the matter to him. But

thinking it would do no more than amuse him, I was so unwise as

to tell the story over the luncheon table. Swinburne was vastly

amused, and rallied his friend gleefully for being what he described

as “the ogre of suckling bardlings,” but Watts-Dunton was visibly

distressed, and took it so much to heart that I had cause to regret

my indiscretion. He brooded over it and rumbled menacingly over

it, recurring to the matter again and again, until lunch was over,

vowing that it mattered nothing to him what this or that “writing

fellow” thought of him as a fellow writer, but that to be credited

with cruelty, and with willingness to give pain, to the younger

generation, with whom he was so entirely in sympathy, was monstrous,

was unthinkable, and was cause for cursing the day he had ever

consented to review for the _Athenæum_.

 

Here are some extracts from another letter in which he reverts to the

matter, and also incidentally gives an interesting peep of Swinburne

and himself on holiday:

 

“The crowning mistake of my life, a life that has been full of

mistakes, I fear, was in drifting into the position of literary

reviewer to a journal, and not drifting out for a quarter of a

century. I not only squandered my efforts, but made unconsciously a

thousand enemies in the literary world whom I can never hope now to

appease until death comes to my aid. Swinburne sends you his kind

regards. He and I are here staying at one of the lovely places in

the Isle of Wight, belonging to his aunt, Lady Mary Gordon. It is a

fairy place. Her late husband’s father took one of the most romantic

spots of the Undercliff and turned the shelves of debris into the

loveliest Italian garden reaching down to the sea. It is so shut in

from the land that it can be seen only from the sea. It puts, as I

always say, Edgar Poe’s _Domain of Arnheim_ into the shade. I know of

nothing in the world so lovely. I have been writing a few sonnets,

but Swinburne does nothing but bathe.”

 

This reference to Swinburne idling reminds me of another letter I

received from Watts-Dunton, in which he pictures yet another great

poet, Tennyson, hard at work and at eighty-two. The letter has no

bearing on the matter immediately under discussion, but by way of

contrast I venture to include it here:

 

ALDWORTH, HASLEMERE, SURREY,

_26th Sept., ’91_.

 

MY DEAR KERNAHAN,

 

My best thanks for your most kind letter which has been forwarded

to me here where I am staying with Tennyson. When I get home I

will write to suggest a day for us to meet at Putney. Tennyson,

with whom I took a long walk of three miles this morning, is in

marvellous health, every faculty (at 82) is as bright as it was

when his years were 40. He is busy writing poetry as fine as

anything he has ever written. He read out to me last night three

poems which of themselves would suffice to make a poet’s fame.

Really he is a miracle. This is a lovely place--I don’t know how

many miles above the level of the sea--bracing to a wonderful

degree.

 

Ever yours,

THEODORE WATTS.

 

The accepted tradition of Watts-Dunton as what Swinburne had called

the ogre of the _Athenæum_ goaded him, was a bugbear and a purgatory

to him to his very life’s end.

 

“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