in good company 13

in good company 13

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